I wrote two posts yesterday about the illegal immigrant family separation issue (this and this) in an effort to get at the facts and the law behind the tsunami of MSM propaganda on the theme.

It wasn’t easy, but it can be done, and there are plenty of people on the right trying to do it. But will it matter, considering the full court press of the MSM and the left, as well as the moderate Republicans joining in? It certainly seems that they believe they finally—finally!—have the formula for slaying the Trump/GOP dragon that has so far eluded them no matter what they’ve launched at it.

The story is the perfect vehicle. It features the seemingly hard-hearted right being cruel to children—children! What monsters can be so cruel to children? The visuals are useful, the rhetoric and emotion heated. The entire campaign was initially launched with a photo of children in “cages” that came from the Obama era, and yet that was forgotten in the barrage of information and misinformation that followed, and the accusations against Trump.

Will it work? I don’t pretend to know. However, it seems to me that the anti-Trump anti-GOP forces believe it will. Of course, they’ve believed that many times before and it hasn’t been the case. But I perceive something different about this one, or at least about the fervor of their belief in this one.

Commenter “M J R” had this to say:

…[F]rom what I’m experiencing based on my Facebook contacts from the Dark Side, the left has finally found an issue that can stick and will have legs. I wish I were wrong.

We know that that other side to the story will never reach the Dark Side, but I genuinely fear that too many otherwise reachable people are going to fall for the appeal to emotion this time around ”” threatening the tentative success of *our* “resistance” to creeping leftism, already on life support.

Appeals to emotion and the desire to protect children are time-honored propaganda methods. The details may change, but the tactic remains. Think Mohammed al-Durah (see this and this). Then there was the photo of the napalmed South Vietnamese girl (see this and this). The first incident was almost certainly staged and fake, but was highly successful in turning European opinion against Israel. The second was true, but the underlying facts were distorted by the press to increase popular opposition to the Vietnam War.

The stories about the children separated at the border are in the latter category: true, but the underlying facts, as well as the law, are being distorted by the MSM in its fervor to appeal to emotion. Emotion is—well, it’s emotional, and children are a sure-fire way to stir it up.

Another commenter at this blog, steve walsh, has remarked that ” nearly all the talking heads selected to comment and pontificate about this issue are women; at least on CNN, CBS, NBC, etc.” I have no idea whether that observation is correct, because I almost never watch TV news and haven’t watched any of the TV coverage of this story, but it wouldn’t surprise me. But the sentiment and the emotional approach is hardly limited to women—it has broad appeal, because we are all wired to want to protect children and families. The left is well aware of that, and acts accordingly.