Quote:
Originally Posted by goofyballer
72% of Americans didn't get a live fact check about the complete and utter lies about El Paso and crime
Yup, and the gaslighting is taking hold. Scary stuff. People in the know are so used to his lies, that we just expect them and barely discuss them during an event like the SOTU. He probably told 10+ big lies, and 50+ small ones tonight. I bet last year we live fact-checked it a lot more... and we're in like the top 1% of politically aware citizens. I think there's a similar effect in the media, his lying is just baked in at this point so some of it flies under the radar.
Here's a great example: he made some claim about illegal border crossings going down drastically in places where a wall was built. This is (I assume) a factually accurate statement, but it is wildly misleading.
Imagine that you have an area like this:
----- ------ ----- ----- -----
There are 100 illegal border crossings in a set period of time, evenly split between the four gaps in barriers - 25 a piece. You add some wall.
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You close in three of the gaps, and border crossings drop to 95 - all in the one gap. But the places where you built the wall saw a 100% decline, whereas the place where you didn't saw a massive increase and the overall number didn't go down much at all.
Meanwhile, 200 people came in to that area legally on a visa and overstayed it, so the wall is totally irrelevant for them... Thus it wasn't even a 5% decrease in illegal immigration for this area, but a 1.6% decrease.
Never the less, the statement that "in the areas that built the wall, illegal immigration went down significantly," is true... and to the average person who's not thinking much about it, it sounds like a significant justification for building a massive border wall.
As far as I'm concerned, to knowingly make a statement like that is a gross distortion of the truth tantamount to a lie. But WaPo may only give it like 1.5 pinnochios (just guessing) and nobody is really talking about it from the coverage I've seen.