“It is necessary to know how to … be a great pretender and dissembler. Men are so simple … that a deceiver will always find someone who is willing to be deceived.”

— Machiavelli, The Prince

Our world is fallen. Our wills are corrupt. Because of this, history often turns on lies. Elites, whether in government or out, know how to manipulate ordinary people in their own interests. They grab onto half-truths, garbled narratives, and gut-wrenching images. Then they use their superior access to media to dominate the public. By the time the truth comes out — sometimes decades later — it’s little more than a footnote. That’s what’s in danger of happening right now on immigration.

You probably saw the TIME cover of a little, crying Central American girl staring up at a monolithic Donald Trump. The story? Trump’s “cruel” separation of illegal immigrants from the children they decided to bring along — some of whom might be theirs.

Of the 12,000 illegal immigrant children now held by the U.S., 10,000 arrived alone. Their parents just trusted them to smugglers.

Many others are kids they either kidnapped or bought, to use as human shields against our immigration laws, or traffic into slave labor or child porn. If we don’t investigate, we’ll never know. More than 10,000 kids were sent into slave labor or sexual exploitation by the Obama administration when it refused to separate adults and kids, even briefly.

Fake News to Promote Lawless Policies

You might not know that everything about this cover is fake. The child was never separated from her mother. She was crying not because of Donald Trump, but because she’s a kid. The photographer might as well have picked some Latina girl crying at Chuck E. Cheese because her ice cream fell on the floor.

The crying Honduran girl on the cover of Time was not separated from her mother, father says https://t.co/HACVjoYThd

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 22, 2018

Her family isn’t broken or even poor. In fact, it’s intact, and the little girl’s mother kidnapped her without the father’s knowledge, leaving her siblings behind. Then she dragged the girl through deserts at the mercy of human smugglers. The same smugglers who rape 80 percent of women and girls they transport, then often leave to die in deserts. THAT is the reality of the U.S. southern border. That’s because it’s no longer part of U.S. sovereign territory under the rule of law. It’s a wild no-man’s land controlled by gangs like MS-13 that smuggle guns, drugs, and children.

Inviting More Rape and Kidnapping

This little girl was lucky, by comparison. Of the 12,000 illegal immigrant children now held by the U.S., 10,000 arrived alone. Their parents just trusted them to smugglers, perhaps in the hope that we’d grant them asylum, and then they could sponsor their families into America too.

The U.S. southern border is no longer part of U.S. sovereign territory under the rule of law. It’s a wild no-man’s land controlled by gangs like MS-13 that smuggle guns, drugs, and children.

You won’t hear any of this from mainstream media. They’re too busy printing the names of hard-working ICE professionals, so that social justice warriors can harass them, and traffickers can murder them. Media elites have seized upon the fake narrative that Donald Trump is terrorizing children just as eagerly as the crackpot conspiracy theory that he was the pawn of Vladimir Putin. As National Review reports, TIME magazine is doubling down on its decision to use that fake story and staged photo on its cover.

Lied Into Wars, Goaded into Revolution

And why not? Lies work. Lies sell. Here are some historical examples:

Remember The Maine? It blew up in Havana harbor, and our yellow press insisted the Spanish had sabotaged it. That dragged the U.S. into the Spanish-American War, which killed many thousands and mired us in empire-building. Too bad The Maine almost certainly blew up from a fire that broke out in its munitions stocks. We found that out many decades later, when the facts no longer mattered.

Remember The Lusitania? That was a U.S. passenger ship sunk by Germany in World War I, which gave Woodrow Wilson the pretext to get us into that war. But in fact, the reason that ship sank so quickly and so many died? It was packed with ammunition for Britain, and thus a legitimate military target. The man to blame for all those American deaths was Wilson, who knowingly let civilians sail on an armaments ship. We found that out many years later, when the facts no longer mattered.

You might not remember, but the riots that erupted in West Germany in 1968 were sparked by a German cop shooting a student protestor. That caused a nationwide uproar that almost toppled the government. It gave the radical Left sudden, massive power throughout universities and other elite institutions. (Then-bishop Josef Ratzinger was shocked into a much more conservative worldview by witnessing the inchoate rage of the student Left.) We found out decades later: That West German cop was an East German spy. He was probably following orders to provoke a student riot, which the Stasi hoped would bring Communists to power.

America on the Brink

Like the U.S. in 1898 and 1917, and Germany in 1968, we sit on a knife-edge. And media manipulators are eager to push us in just one direction.

Our nation is right now on the verge of making an existential decision. Will we have borders and enforce our laws? Or will we invite all 147 million would-be immigrants who told Gallup they want to move here to grab the nearest child, and sneak across our borders? Will we eliminate ICE, as NY governor’s candidate Cynthia Nixon is demanding? 

Will we follow the Congressional Democrats, who’ve written a bill that would let any criminal within 150 miles of the border or port of entry stay with his family? Will we obey bishops and pastors who are de facto demanding open borders, despite the vast human death toll that a wave of children marching through the desert will suffer?

The choice is ours. If we passively let the media and other elites make it for us, then in the post-sovereign chaos that engulfs what was once America, the facts will no longer matter.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and co-author of the new book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration.