ANGELO LYNN

Forgive the poor Fox News viewer for having a dim view of Democrats. If that’s where you get your news, how could you not?

Take this one example: Trump appointed Tom Holman as his border czar. Holman began his career as a police officer, then a Border Patrol Agent, then a Special Agent investigating criminal organizations that smuggle aliens or traffic in females and children. From that modest background, Trump elevated him as the tough-talking ICE Director, who harbored rabid conspiracy theories, during his first term.

That role gave Holman a rightwing audience and millions of Fox News viewers have seen him claim (over and over) through much of 2024 that Americans are living, as Josh Levs says in his podcast and newsletter, They Stand Corrected, “in a dystopian society in which the horrific scourge of sex trafficking increased a whopping 600%” during President Biden’s presidency. It’s Holman’s standard talking point on illegal immigration.

Perhaps you’ve heard it Perhaps you believed it.

If so, and like so many other issues, you got suckered.

Levs cites well-researched information that debunks much of Holman’s storyline: first, exact numbers are hard to pin down, but what’s known is the number of sex-trafficking convictions were either up or the same from 2012-2020, but declined precipitously during 2020, the last year Trump was in office in his first term. The decline is not likely because of a lack of incidents, but rather prosecutors that relaxed their focus on the crime. The number of incidents jumped back up in 2021 to the prior 8-year average, and increased slightly in 2022, the latest year figures are available.

Moreover, 95% of those convicted were U.S. citizens. Only 3.4% were “undocumented non-U.S. citizens” — almost the opposite of what Holman so often claims. And of those convictions, 58% were listed as white, while only 18% were listed as Hispanic. As Levs notes, that’s certainly “not the image you get from hearing Holman constantly discuss (sex trafficking) in the same breath as illegal immigrants.”

Now, extrapolate the point: Why would Fox News viewers support Democrats if the Dems are so epically failing on an issue like sex-trafficking?

“This is just one example of how the media’s ‘open mic nights’ for liars create seismic problems,” Levs says. “It’s not just that Trump and his team amass power through lying. It’s that people who want to build a better society aren’t given the information they need to be productive… To tackle any problem, you have to start with the facts. Just as doctors can only recommend courses of action based on diagnoses, we as a nation can only work to fix problems when we know what’s causing them.”

Trump has been masterful in one thing: capturing the political right’s attention and inuring it to his daily diet of lies, misinformation, disinformation, distractions, wild conspiracies and utter nonsense to the point they are a sponge for anything he says without the energy to think critically.

Media literacy, or learning to tell the difference between political lies and what’s accurate, is one of America’s most pressing challenges. Suffice it to say, Trump and his team won’t be a hurry to help.

Angelo Lynn