From the As-The-Right-Wing's-World of Propaganda-Turns Department:
Here are two questions I'm thinking about this morning:
1) What happened to the Obama-caused Ebola epidemic that was supposed to hit the homeland with a vengeance, according to Fox News and right-wing radio talk show hosts? -- http://www.msnbc.com/...
2) What's up with all the ISIS fighters that California Republican Representative Duncan Hunter claimed have come over the Mexican border in the past several months? -- http://www.splcenter.org/...
In an Editorial in the Winter 2014 edition of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report, titled "Propaganda, Duncan Hunter and the Border," Editor Mark Potok uses claims by Rep. Hunter that ISIS fighter are heading over the Mexican border to unleash mayhem in the homeland, to point out that "There are propagandists who use selective facts to make their dubious points. There are propagandists who lie to cover up what the real facts are. And then there are propagandists who just don’t care."
Potok pointed out that "Since appearing on Oct. 7 on Fox News’ On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, Hunter has not produced the remotest shred of evidence to support the claims he made there — and he even doubled down on them as news organization after news organization found them to be utterly false.
“'ISIS is coming across the border,' Hunter told Van Susteren, referring to the Islamic State, the infamous Middle Eastern terror group known for its beheadings. 'They don’t fly B-1 bombers bombing American cities, but they are going to be bombing American cities coming across from Mexico.'”
Potok:
The Department of Homeland Security immediately called Hunter’s fairy tale “categorically false.” The Texas Department of Public Safety wrote state legislators saying it had nothing to back up the claim, and a spokesman for the Border Patrol agents’ union said the same. Terrorism analysts said they knew nothing of any arrests. And PolitiFact, known for carefully examining such claims, concluded it was a “Pants on Fire” falsehood.
Hunter, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, is a longtime immigration opponent, even advocating the deportation of citizens who are children of undocumented immigrants. Clearly, to support his nativist claims he was willing to say just about anything — whether or not it had any relation to the truth.