Nov. 27, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:04
4254 "Art of the Narrative: How viral photos of suffering kids shape (& silence) immigration debate" - Article Review
"You’ve seen it by now: Two women and two little children, barefoot and in diapers, fleeing teargas on the US-Mexico border. The powerful image has gone viral, and it’s not the first time. But to what end?Taken on Sunday by Reuters photographer Kim Kyung-Hoon, the photo soon appeared on the front pages and splashed across the screens of every single US mainstream media outlet. It quickly spread via social media, eclipsing every other image from the incident - in which a group of migrants from the Central American “caravans” tried to storm the US border as San Ysidro.Trump tear gasses children!” howled the US president’s critics, using the photo as a bludgeon against the current administration’s border enforcement and immigration policies.“These children are barefoot. In diapers. Choking on tear gas,” tweeted California’s governor-elect Gavin Newsom, a Democrat. “That’s not my America. We’re a land of refuge. Of hope. Of freedom. And we will not stand for this.”The Washington Post used Newsom’s words as a headline, solidifying the paper’s ongoing narrative that the “caravans” departing from El Salvador and Honduras, headed to the US border through Guatemala and Mexico, were peaceful crowds of asylum-seekers, mostly women and children, driven by fear of violence and political persecution.https://www.rt.com/op-ed/444932-migrants-teargas-children-photo/▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
So, pretty good article here from RT. I'm sure I'll be accused of Russia collusion now.
The art of the narrative. How viral photos of suffering kids shape and silence immigration debate.
So, you've seen this image, of course.
There's this woman wearing a frozen t-shirt, right, to trigger the moms.
And she's got kids all over the place.
They're in diapers and fleeing all over.
And there's a kind of gas here, and it's a pretty cropped photograph and all of that, and the kids are barefoot and so on, right?
Now, this, of course, is the woman who's supposed to have made it all the way from Honduras to the American border.
With two kids.
Boy, anyone who tries to take little kids on a hike knows that you get about 13 seconds in before they start needing to use the washroom, complaining of being tired and wanting a burger of some kind.
So yeah, but she made it, of course, all the way in and they're fleeing from tear gas and it's just important to remember that There's suffering everywhere in the world all the time.
People die every day.
People are tortured. People are wounded.
There's suffering every day.
Now, of all of the suffering in the world, the suffering that the media chooses to present to you just so happens, wouldn't you know, just so happens to align with the exact demographic political preferences of the Democrat Party.
Isn't that amazing? All the suffering in the world The people who are going to come in, who are going to balsa the Hispanic vote, who are going to end up voting for Democrats, that is the people whose suffering you are being exposed to.
So, the people who are killed by illegal immigrants, well, you can't see those people because that might give people pause about illegal immigration.
And the people who were killed by Muslim terrorists, of course, you can't see those.
It's all just ascribed to mental illness and goes down the memory hall, as happened here in Canada at the Danforth.
But this suffering, the suffering of the people who are going to vote Democrat, this must be endlessly paraded in front of your face.
And that's really all it's about.
They're opening up the border or indicating that they're going to open up the border in order to draw Hispanics to the border where they're going to face the might of the state.
I mean, because Trump's in power.
And this way, of course, the Hispanic vote is going to be ginned up and maybe they're concerned about Candace Owens' Blexit or Runaway.
I don't know. Walk away? Not fast enough.
Run! Run away.
She, chameleon. So it's brutal.
It's cynical. It is the use of human suffering and, in fact, the summoning of human suffering in order to make Political advantage.
It is absolutely horrendous behavior.
So yeah, you've seen this picture.
It was shot by Reuters photographer Kim Kim Hoon, and this of course has been shown by absolutely Everyone.
CNN, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, right?
They're all using the same image.
Now, photography, of course, is very powerful because photography is like a hack into your brain.
It bypasses your neofrontal cortex.
It goes straight to your amygdala, provokes your fight and flight, your sympathy.
And this is well known by manipulative propagandists and so on.
So what do you have?
You get Trump tear gasses children.
No, no, that's of course not what's happening.
What's happening is this woman has taken her children into what is essentially a war zone by participating in an illegal invasion of the United States.
If you drag your child to a war zone, well, you're a very, very, very bad parent.
I did this tweet. It kind of went viral last night.
I said, you know, in America, you can get in serious trouble.
If your 10-year-old child walks home from the playground on his own or her own, and if your child goes bicycling without a helmet, you can get in serious trouble.
But you drag your children to what is in effect a war zone, and you're a hero who's just looking for a better life.
And it's terrible. It's absolutely terrible.
Wretched. The vast majority, of course, of young men who were there.
You don't see those.
You don't see the rock throwing. You don't see the attacks upon border guards in Mexico and elsewhere.
You just see this, you know, sad woman and children.
And the children shouldn't be there.
Of course the children shouldn't be there.
I mean, who takes children to a war zone?
Who takes children and pushes them ahead of the general crowd?
Well, we know, of course, who does these kinds of things.
Absolutely monstrous. Monstrous people.
Now, there was, of course, about once a month, clear gas was used on the border against illegal immigrants by Obama, but you see, that suffering didn't serve the needs of the Democrats, so that suffering was not shown to you.
And that's just terrible.
Just terrible, right?
So this guy, Francisco Peleo, says, I see a scared mother trying to protect her children.
Donald Trump sees a mobster who wants to start a fistfight.
What do you see in this picture?
Now, this scared mother, that kind of narrative is really rough.
It is really, really rough because it implies that the mother is a victim.
It implies that the mother did not voluntarily Drag her children thousands of miles to effectively go into a war zone.
And that is pretty rough.
That is pretty rough to see.
Yes, Michael Skolnick with Donald Trump puts babies in cages.
Donald Trump tear gasses children.
Yeah, it's real tear gas under Obama and fake tears under Trump.
So again, this is very interesting because the idea, and it comes out of a very strange place when it comes to basic human agency, because this idea that if you commit a criminal action, then it is the president who is responsible for you facing sanctions, right? I mean, let's say that you drunk drive and you crash into a garden gnome and then you get arrested.
Well, Policeman puts man in cage, right?
No, you drunk drove.
You put yourself in that situation.
So this idea that...
It's just, you know, babies and how it's terrible.
Of course, if the left cared at all about babies, they would stop advocating for policies that swell up the national debt.
It's true of the right as well. I mean, the social spending goes actually up under Republicans, so they're pretty rough as well.
But they would improve the school system.
They would not have national debts and so on.
But they don't care about children.
I mean, come on. This person, Nate, many things are seared in my memory from the past two years.
Nothing will tear this horror away.
Simply atrocious. To the silent, you are cowards on the wrong side of history.
Chemical weapons against children sounds just like Syria.
Well, of course.
These children are barefoot in diapers, choking on tear gas.
And, again, no agency for the parents, bringing them kids into essentially in...
A war zone. And this, this is not who we are.
This is not my America.
We're a land of refuge, of hope, of freedom, and we will not stand for this and so on.
Come on! They vote Democrat.
We get it! They vote Democrat.
You know who's really in danger of being wiped out in some ways?
The South African farmers.
But you see, they're white and probably quite conservative, so you don't want them at all, do you, right?
So, just crazy.
See, they're just traveling from Central America to the US, right?
This is breaking news. A migrant family part of a caravan of thousands.
They're just traveling. They're just traveling.
You know, like, if you go into someone's house in the middle of the night...
Armed, you're just going over to someone's house.
You're just visiting. You're visiting.
You're visiting the house.
They're just traveling. Just traveling.
They're not... Well, of course, the only thing that you know about these illegal aliens is that they're criminals because they're in Mexico illegally.
Already they're criminals. And secondly, that they have no respect for American laws at all.
Or Mexican laws, for that matter.
So they're absolutely anti-law.
They will not respect the rules of the societies they want to enter.
That's all you know. Like, praxeologically, axiomatically, that's all you know, and that really should be enough.
And this idea that, oh, well, we can't have any suffering.
We can't have any suffering in the world.
This is the great delusion that is used to manipulate people, and it, of course, is the source of the greatest suffering the world over, is the idea that we should somehow not have any suffering in the world.
So, yeah, they keep calling these caravans peaceful crowds of asylum seekers.
It's like, no, if you're an asylum seeker, you get to Mexico and you begin the process of legally applying for asylum in the United States.
That's called being an asylum seeker.
And if you simply charge through Mexico and then try and charge across the border, you're an invader.
You are a criminal. I don't really...
It's a difference between somebody on the road asking you for five bucks and somebody on the road...
Grabbing your wallet and running.
But you see, transfer of money, if you say yes to the $5, transfer of money occurs either way.
So this is all madness.
That narrative, right?
Oh yes, they're women and children driven by fear of violence and political persecution.
And people compare this to the Holocaust.
It's absolutely vile. Absolutely vile.
Hispanics, newsflash Hispanics, are not being genocided by the governments in Mexico or in Honduras or other places.
And so the idea that they're being persecuted for what?
For what? I mean, we assume they're leftists because the Democrats want them into America.
Are leftists really being persecuted in Central and South America?
Come on, it's ridiculous.
So, yeah, attempting to hook into the suffering of the Jews and homosexuals and the intellectuals, you know, when the communists come in, they shoot everyone in glasses.
It's a vile hijacking of history.
You know, like Neil deGrasse Tyson was tweeting...
Albert Einstein was a refugee, and it's like, well...
Some truth in that, although he got out of Germany years before he came to America.
But yeah, he came in legally.
He was not swarming with a bunch of people who are all criminals by definition.
They are not respecting the laws of entry into either America or Mexico.
And yeah, he was...
I mean, maybe I'll do a truth about Einstein.
I mean, some pretty good arguments about plagiarism that he perpetrated.
There is, of course, the fact that he loved Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Not his real name, by the way.
And this guy was a genocidal murderer who oversaw the holotemor and the mass slaughter through starvation of Ukrainians and others.
And set up the first concentration camps and gulags and was just an absolute monstrous dictator.
And yeah, Albert Einstein really, really admired him, you see.
And he was a socialist.
So Albert Einstein fled from socialism because it was the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
Hitler hated capitalism. And yes, Mussolini was an ex-Marxist, so don't tell me all about this fascism right-wing stuff.
They all came out of the socialist tradition.
And so he fled socialism.
And came to capitalism where he attempted to foment socialism and never renounce socialism and praised very highly a mass murdering genocide, well, a mass murdering by the millions dictator in Russia.
So, yeah, that's Einstein for you.
So, yeah, this is just really an astounding, right?
So, yeah, they say, oh, it's not an invasion, it's hundreds of miles away.
They're not going to jump the border wall.
These are all just designed to lull you into a false sense of security.
So, of course, none of this has turned out to be true.
This is Jim Acosta lecturing that this is why Acosta got banned for a while, until he basically became a stalker and demanded access to the president that the president didn't want to give, because apparently it's not my podium, my choice anymore, because...
They want to be able to harangue the president for political grandstanding.
So yeah, the narrative is working as intended.
The Tijuana mayor said there was a humanitarian crisis, says we will not pay for migrants, seeking the UN help.
Of course, the UN wants to make mass migration a requirement for countries to honor, which means Western European countries.
And of course, the UN wants to criminalize criticism of migrants, which is just monstrous.
I mean, the idea that Western countries are still funding this monstrous Agency is utterly beyond me.
And you know, this goes all the way back, this manipulation of children.
It's a very classic, horrifying meme.
And so, yeah, remember this one?
The little girl, a Guatemalan girl, she was supposed to have been separated from her mother at the border, photoshopped to face a cruel, unfeeling Trump on the cover of Time magazine's family separation policy.
But the girl was crying.
It was the middle of the night. She and her mother had just been caught crossing the border illegally.
They were detained together.
And, oh, family separation!
Turns out the mother of this little girl had left Guatemala without telling the father, who had no idea where his daughter was until the photo was published.
How monstrous! Now that's what I call family separation and, of course, the kids in cages, concentration camps for innocent migrant children just tossed in cages and chicken wire and so on.
And the photo was from 2014, so of course it was under Barack Obama.
Another photo of the caged boy was actually staged.
And you say these things with a certain amount of hopelessness, like you know that these are all lies and manipulations, but at the same time it bypasses people's rational faculties, hits them straight in the fields.
And it's just so open to manipulation.
And it's so easy for people to chest-lump and say, oh, well, I'm a good person.
I care. And this is all going to, this must change.
And, you know, just out there.
Virtual signaling, right?
Which is civilization destroying sophistry.
And, yeah, immigration protests.
There is the chant, no ban, no war, no USA at all.
And it's almost like a climate culture difference, right?
So Europeans, whites, grew up in winter, right?
If you didn't plan for winter, if you didn't manage your resources and know that resources are scarce and so on, then you starve to death over the winter.
And other cultures from warmer climates faced other difficulties, but usually lack of food wasn't one of them because they had a growing season year-round, there was plenty of game and so on.
So this idea that there's just an infinite amount of money is partly cultural and partly, I think, based upon the geography of climate.
And that's obviously a fairly abstract thesis, but I think that's really something to it.
I've done a whole presentation on this called Gene Wars, G-E-N-E Wars, which you should really, really check out the difference between R versus K selection.
Now, of course, when...
When the Western governments were pushing for regime change in Damascus, Turkey opened the gates of its refugee camps and told the Syrians, go west.
And the European countries didn't want to open their borders.
And then this photo of the little lifeless boy in a red shirt And this, of course, you can't see, right, the kid, the little girl who was mown down by one of the terrorist attacks, I think it was in Paris, you can't see her, you can't see her body, right, because that might, that goes against the narrative, right, because Muslims, migrants from the third world, vote overwhelmingly for the left, and so you've got to open the borders for that.
Refugees must be welcomed. Humanity must prevail.
These are all just words. As if there's just an infinity of resources.
Now, I would actually be interested if these people were to say something like this.
We do want to open The borders to migrants.
Here's how much they're going to cost.
So here's how much we need to either raise taxes or cut other government services.
But there's this, why would you deny air to someone, you fascist?
It's like, well, no, we don't have an infinity of resources.
This is the lack of economic understanding, right?
All human desires are infinite.
All resources are finite.
This is the basis of economics.
Also, the people respond to incentives like bring people in who vote for you.
And yeah, this boy was put on an overloaded boat in stormy seas by his father who wanted to get to Canada for dental treatment.
Again, your kid goes out without a bike helmet, you can get in serious trouble.
But you can put a kid on an overloaded boat because you want free dental work and suddenly Europe has to Open all of its borders to everything, right?
So yeah, this is a really good way of putting this, right?
Visuals like photos and video are the most powerful form of persuasion.
Seeing suffering, children, triggers our basic human emotions.
Between the two, whoever is using such pictures to push a narrative is basically hacking the feelings of their intended audience.
To what end? Some do it for money, others for power and prestige, all the while telling themselves and the targets of their deception.
That it is all for the greater good, of course.
So it's a good article, well worth reading, and there's a principle to get out of it.
I've tried to help a lot of people in my life, and occasionally it's gone well.
A lot of times it has not.
And what I've learned is this.
You can't care more for people than they do for themselves.
That is a recipe for being exploited and just being used up until you're dried out in a sycamore in the wind of history.
So... This woman, how much does she care about her children if she's bringing them to what is, in effect, a war zone?
She doesn't care about her children. She's willing to use them as props, or she's being willing to use her props, or maybe she's there by force, or maybe they aren't even her children.
Nobody knows. But I can't care more for these kids than the people do themselves.
Because, unfortunately, we live in a very predatory world, and if you care more for people than they do for themselves, or you care more for their children than they do...
