BUCK: We have a recent Jen Psaki addition here. We got a crisis. They don’t want to call it a crisis. They want to tell you there’s a plan. They won’t tell you what the plan actually is. Here is DHS Secretary Mayorkas, for example, telling us all that the results are starting to be showing up here.
MAYORKAS: I’ve been quite clear that we do have a plan to address, uh, migration at the southern border. We’re executing it. It takes time, and we’re starting to see the results. I’d be very pleased to meet with you, umm, and discuss with you some of the tools that we have employed, uh, to actually drive the results that we saw this past month and we expect to see in the oncoming months.
BUCK: Now, “the results” are, Clay, we have effectively an open border. We can all see it. We’re all aware of it. “The plan” is always kept very vague. Is the plan that you’re going to turn away everybody who enters the U.S. illegally and is trying to game the system?
Or is the plan to make sure people don’t understand — the American people don’t understand — the complexities and loopholes of this process that are so adeptly being exploited so that they don’t even know that thousands are coming into the country? We did get one piece of the plan, though.
Remember a couple of days ago, everybody, when there was the “They’re whipping Haitian migrants from horseback!” That’s what they were saying about the Border Patrol. The problem with it was that that was completely false. The facts are not in dispute about that. It was false. It did not happen. They were horse… I believe split reins is what they’re call culled. I don’t know much about riding on horseback, but they were reins.
Here is the latest from the White House.
PSAKI: One, we feel those images are horrible and horrific. There is an investigation that the president certainly supports overseen by the Department of Homeland Security which he has conveyed will happen quickly. I can also convey to you that the secretary also conveyed to civil rights leaders earlier this morning that we would no longer be using horses in Del Rio. So that is something, a policy change that has been made in response.
BUCK: No more horses, Clay! Get rid of the horses for the story that was a lie when they told it the first time. That’s the plan.
CLAY: They’ve been using horses… This is a perfect representation of what goes on with viral social media, often untrue but viral imagery, okay? Can be videos; can be imagery. This is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Let’s be clear what’s going on here.
They’re doing an investigation into a photo of a Border Patrol official on a horse trying to restrain immigrants from illegally entering the country, and they still can’t tell us why 12,000 people ended up simultaneously somehow under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. They are banning horses?
Buck, you’ve been down to the border. I’m not an expert on horses, certainly. But I would imagine the reason why we use horses in those scenarios is because it’s very hard to move around on your feet because the border terrain is so rough that you cannot drive, let’s say, a Polaris or some sort of vehicle along the border.
You want to have the height of the horse and that you want to have the ability to go across water, that you want to be able to move faster. The same reason that horses were pretty proper before we had cars is why we uses horses on the border!
So suddenly banning the use of horses at Del Rio, which is strange, is just going to make the Border Patrol’s job that much more difficult than it already was. It’s cosmetic theater. It’s rearranging the chairs on the Titanic after the iceberg’s already been hit.
BUCK: Clay, there’s a mounted unity they call it here in New York City with the NYPD, used for patrol — and usually they’ll bring it in particularly for crowd control — because there is an elevated sight line from it and also people tend to recognize them. The cop is more visible. I mean, there are reasons for having a mounted patrol in the city, although sometimes it can be a bit messy.
But, anyway, the idea that you would get rid of this, though, and you have Mayorkas saying the plan is being implemented and it is already showing up in ways that are important? We don’t know what that means. They won’t give us numbers. They’re hiding it from us. And then one concrete thing we see is adjusting the optics of how Border Patrol is doing their jobs, making it a little harder for them to do their jobs.
As you rightly point out, there’s a reason they’re using horses: The terrain and just the ability to maneuver more fully and to see better what’s going on. But they do this in response to a story that’s not even true. This reminds me of when the left, for example, will have one of their frequent hate crime hoaxes, whether it’s Jussie Smollett or any number right, the noose in the NASCAR door and all these things, the nooses in the push parks that it turned out to be put up there by —
CLAY: Exercise.
BUCK: — a young African-American the guy to do exercise with like he was essentially using them to do pull-ups and things. You have these stories that come out, and even when the story is fake, the approach of the left is, “Well, we’ve got people emotional right now; so let’s make sure that we cater to that emotion in some way and maybe even take a policy directive.”
They’re gonna get rid of horses because of a thing that didn’t actually happen. So what’s that all about? It’s distraction, it’s incompetence, and because they don’t have better things to say.
CLAY: And it’s also where social media leads us, and I think that’s the biggest and most important take-away that you can have here. Social media is about extinguishing individual anecdotal stories which often don’t underlie or address the larger issues at place. This is how we got to defund the police.
This is a part of the overall structure that we’re in the middle of right now, Buck. Video of George Floyd goes out. The response isn’t, “Okay, let’s address this one individual incident to the best of our legal ability.” It is, “This is representative of what happens to black people with police all over the country.”
No, it isn’t. The reason why this is such a big story is because it’s so rare. Outlier incidents — and the one at the border here with Del Rio is even crazier because, as you rightly point out, it isn’t even real, right? The allegations and the story and the way that it spread is not rooted in reality.
But we try and solve big issues by addressing viral moments, and oftentimes that leads us to a 29% overall murder increase. When you solve one small issue — and I’m putting “solve” in quotation marks — you create a bigger one. And this is also covid writ large, right? Buck? This is like masks. Masks don’t do anything.
We’re obsessed with fighting over masks, and they don’t have any actual, tangible impact. Social distancing. We’re seeing all of this cosmetic theater, what I would refer to as the syndrome of rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. Hey, the iceberg’s been hit.
We got a major issue we have to address here. Where you’re sitting on the deck of the Titanic ain’t gonna matter in the end, and that’s what’s going on at the border. That’s what’s going on with our country. It’s a systemic failure of being able to address issues.
BUCK: Remember, with the Titanic, though, analogy, you know, you and I see the rule of law and sovereignty and the border going down under the waves, so to speak. They view this as a giant pathway to more Democrat voters and power. So the problem of the border is actually not one of, “They’re not good at handling the problem,” so much as it is they have a very different view of what the outcome should be.
We’re there; they’re there. There’s a fire, and we’re saying, “Hey, guys, turn on the hose. Right? We all want this fire out.” And they’re saying, “No. I thought this house was kind of ugly. I think we let it burn to the ground.” It’s a very different approach to what’s actually going on. So we need to remember that, too.
CLAY: And, by the way, the media falls victim to it, right? ‘Cause that’s gonna end up being the story. Instead of all these migrants that are there and what’s gonna happen to them it’s, “Oh, are they still gonna let people be on horseback?”
BUCK: Horseback. Of course. It’s ’cause it’s easy. It’s easy virtue signaling for idiot blue check journos inside the Beltway.