George Rebane
People who are informed primarily through media soundbites have been shown to have very volatile opinions. When a new and contrary tranche of soundbites comes along, such people more often than not change their minds and follow the new direction of the most recent compelling soundbite. This is because soundbite driven opinions are reactionary and not reasoned. That is simply because the individual takes no time or effort to develop any depth of understanding in what he currently believes. Finicky and fleeting feelings drive decisions for such people. Bryan Caplan, in his The Myth of the Rational Voter, was one of the first to publish the research confirming how voters make decisions about issues and candidates.
The bottom line acceptance of Caplan’s findings is corroborated by how politicians and our news media (specifically the lamestream) construct their messages for soundbite thinkers. This morning’s analyses of President Trump’s Oval Office speech last night is chuck full of such messaging.
One frequently used ruse is to dismiss stated levels by surreptitiously sliding the argument over to rates, and also dismiss inconvenient rates by citing the more fortuitous change in the offending rate. [For the technically versed, this well-known process is known as ‘climbing the derivative ladder’ until you find the one that serves your narrative.] An example here is the President’s citing the high number of illegals currently coming over the border. This the lamestream journalist brushes off by telling listeners that the rate of illegals entering was higher in the past. For innumerates and soundbite thinkers, this is an effective way to dismiss concern over the continuing rate of illegal entrants. Presented in this context, it never occurs to them that what’s happening now is still a huge and preventable problem that overwhelms our border security personnel.
Another well-oiled piece of legerdemain is how criminality rates, acts, and incarceration costs for illegal aliens are papered over in light minds. One only has to point out that rates of criminality for US citizens’ are higher than for illegal aliens, which is further confounded by substituting the unadorned ‘immigrant’ label, letting one play with all kinds of stats that include legal immigrants. But the point is again that the soundbite thinker never considers that the indigenous US criminality rate doesn’t matter in this argument. Why? Because the illegals contribute existential marginal rates, acts, and costs that we wouldn’t have to bear were we to significantly reduce our border porosity.
The same smoke is blown to fog minds when our leftwing politicians pooh-pooh the cross-border terrorist threat by reminding their simple-minded constituents that more terrorists have been caught entering through our airports than when coming illegally across our southern border. Again, that is an irrelevant argument against more border security infrastructure for two reasons. First, that more bad people are stopped here, does not mean that we should now ignore the fewer bad people who are stopped elsewhere – should we not do a better job at stopping them wherever we can? Second, arrest stats are one thing (what we can measure), but no one knows the actual terrorist influx rates (what we can’t measure). All we know for certain is that if we greatly reduce means and points of illegal entry, then we also minimize the marginal number of terrorists who successfully enter our country.
The same light can be shed on the progressives’ countering the influx of illegal narcotics problem. They get the nation’s snuffies to breathe a sigh of relief when they cite that more drugs are intercepted at legal points of entry than have been stopped coming over our wildland borders. Again, no one knows exactly what levels of successful drug smuggling occurs by either means. And a little thought reveals once more that the counter argument here is irrelevant, because reducing border porosity reduces the rates of successful entry of illegal drugs. And this has a double benefit because of the corresponding level of crime against innocent victims will be reduced in border areas that are relatively immune to penetration. Regions near such borders lose value to migrants, coyotes, and drug gangs.
Finally, there is the Left’s response to the notion that our porous southern border presents a national security crisis. Their effective counter to this, one that brings a halt to all further thought in our soundbite citizens, is that “mothers and children are a humanitarian crisis, not a national security problem.” They are indeed, but what our good-hearted Democrat brethren don’t even bother to consider is that this is a purposed and systematically solicited humanitarian crisis that serves a much more sophisticated Democrat agenda.
Mothers and children have suddenly started migrating in ‘caravans’ by the thousands from central America because the Democrat Party has provided the ‘pull’ by putting out word that they are welcome here, and will receive succor if they are successful in crossing the border by any means. On the other end providing the ‘push’, leftwing NGOs are active in central America putting out the word and organizing the caravans with promises (mostly made good) of transport, food, and shelter being available to them on their 2,000 mile journeys to wildland border crossing points and legal ports of entry.
Again, these are recently manufactured humanitarian crises for Democrats’ political gain, and can be stopped immediately by making the border much more secure. This would halt the activists’ invitations on this side of the border, and also the organized instigations going on in the source shithole countries. And one would have to be a naïf to believe that among the masses of families and unaccompanied children there are not untold numbers of bad actors melding into the desperate throngs demanding to be let in.
As a postscript, perhaps what is most astonishing is that soundbiters are successfully being convinced that ‘walls don’t work’, an easily refuted and bald-faced lie which, when swallowed, is interpreted by the intellectual innocents to mean that therefore no physical barriers at the border are effective, they are simply “immoral”. (more here)
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