Fear, Hysteria and Fake News in Homer, Alaska

[numan]

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Here is:

a transcript of this morning's NPR "This American Life"

about the typically uninformed American hysteria about the immigration "question."

Brian Reed
Basically, there's been this huge political fight going on in the town. Everyone's at each other's throats. They're going crazy on social media. They're up in arms. You know, my friend, who's lived there for decades, three decades, says she's never seen the town like this before.

Ira Glass
And what's the issue?

Brian Reed
Well, it started over illegal immigration, which is a weird thing for Homer to be fighting over, because it doesn't really have any immigrants, which makes sense, given where Homer is.

Ira Glass
Yeah, Homer's far.

Brian Reed
Yeah, it's literally the end of the road in America. That's like what they're known as.

Ira Glass
What does that mean?

Brian Reed
All right, so say like you were to drive, like cross over the Canadian border from Washington State, say.

Ira Glass
OK, so I'm in Washington State. I've crossed into Canada.

Brian Reed
Yeah, you're driving north. You're driving for like 2,500 miles, like it's like basically the same length as crossing the US coast to coast. All right, so you go all the way up Canada that way. You cross back into Alaska. Can you picture that?

Ira Glass
Mm-hmm.

Brian Reed
All right, then you got like another 11 hours. You're going to drive on to the peninsula, the Kenai Peninsula. You keep driving. And then it's right on this bay called the Kachemak Bay. And stretching out into the bay is this little strip of land called the spit.

Ira Glass
Mm-hmm.

Brian Reed
That's the end of the road. It's the furthest you can drive in America. And that's Homer.

Ira Glass
What that means, is if you were to cross into the United States from Mexico, this is possibly the least convenient place in America you could end up....

Brian Reed
Are you aware of any undocumented immigrants in Homer?

Woman 1
No.

Brian Reed
Do you have any memory of there being an undocumented immigrant in Homer?

Man 1
No.

Brian Reed
Have you ever heard of an undocumented immigrant in Homer?

Woman 2
No.

Brian Reed
Have you ever heard of an undocumented immigrant being in Homer in your almost 40 years here?

Man 3
No....

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[numan]

'
In the course of the show this titbit came up:

Next, Ben and Damien and I looked at one of the Breitbart articles that made a big impression on Ben. It starts, quote, "A massive migrant crime wave is surging across Germany," end quote, citing a report from the interior ministry that's over 100 pages long and entirely in German. The article says Germany recorded roughly 402,000 crimes committed by migrants in 2015. Damien read the underlying report, and he says that 402,000 number--

Damien Mcguinness
That is correct. That's a correct figure.

Brian Reed
Except--

Damien Mcguinness
This 400,000 figure is actually including the crime of crossing the border as an asylum seeker. Now by definition, that can only be committed by migrants, and in fact, is how most refugees, by legitimately accepted international law, actually apply for asylum.
Now when you take away that particular criminal act of crossing the border, what you then find is actually-- and the government report very clearly says this-- in fact, the crime rates remained pretty much the same 2015 compared to the year before.

Brian Reed
The Breitbart article does say that many of these crimes were border crimes. They don't leave that information out completely. But in reality, that's all that 400,000 number is-- immigration infractions like border crossing or overstaying a visa. It doesn't include any other type of crime.

Damien Mcguinness
They're using proper statistics, but not putting them in the right context. And then they're using alarmist language like, "A massive migrant crime wave is surging across Germany."

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Also:

Brian Reed
We talked through a few other things Ben found in his research. I tell him that a French speaking colleague and I spoke to several law enforcement sources in France, and they all said the concept of "no-go zones," immigrant neighborhoods where native French people were supposedly not allowed in, are not real.

One of them told us it was, quote, "an American invention." And Damien agrees. He says it's become a bit of a joke in Europe that to Americans, entire cities are no-go zones. Damien also tells Ben about a Breitbart story he had personal experience with from earlier this year, which claimed that a mob of Muslim men had set Germany's oldest church on fire.

It included a video of supposed Islamists chanting in the streets nearby and celebrating. Damien remembers seeing that story appear on the internet and then trying to run it down with other journalists, only to find that the church was not Germany's oldest. It had not been set on fire. A stray firework had briefly ignited some netting on some scaffolding, but that was it. And the men celebrating in the video were not Islamists, but actually anti-Islamist. They were Syrian refugees celebrating a ceasefire in the war back home.

Ben Tire
I remember that story. My gosh.

Damien Mcguinness
You remember reading it?

Ben Tire
Yes.

Brian Reed
It was something Ben came across in his research and he believed it.

Brian Reed
So you thought that Islamists burned down Germany's oldest church?

Ben Tire
Yes, yes I did. I mean, I had no reason not to. Wow. I'm kind of flabbergasted, actually, and more than a little bit angry at this point.

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[Call Sign Chaos]

'
In the course of the show this titbit came up:

Next, Ben and Damien and I looked at one of the Breitbart articles that made a big impression on Ben. It starts, quote, "A massive migrant crime wave is surging across Germany," end quote, citing a report from the interior ministry that's over 100 pages long and entirely in German. The article says Germany recorded roughly 402,000 crimes committed by migrants in 2015. Damien read the underlying report, and he says that 402,000 number--

Damien Mcguinness
That is correct. That's a correct figure.

Brian Reed
Except--

Damien Mcguinness
This 400,000 figure is actually including the crime of crossing the border as an asylum seeker. Now by definition, that can only be committed by migrants, and in fact, is how most refugees, by legitimately accepted international law, actually apply for asylum.
Now when you take away that particular criminal act of crossing the border, what you then find is actually-- and the government report very clearly says this-- in fact, the crime rates remained pretty much the same 2015 compared to the year before.

Brian Reed
The Breitbart article does say that many of these crimes were border crimes. They don't leave that information out completely. But in reality, that's all that 400,000 number is-- immigration infractions like border crossing or overstaying a visa. It doesn't include any other type of crime.

Damien Mcguinness
They're using proper statistics, but not putting them in the right context. And then they're using alarmist language like, "A massive migrant crime wave is surging across Germany."

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Ya they always had mass rape epidemics on a single day across the continent before the rapefugees showed up.