Looks bad, right?
[T] image was not a photograph of a real event in Portland, but instead a fabrication created by combining two photographs of scenes that unfolded in South America nearly a decade apart.
The image of the police officers comes from a photo of “South American riot police” that was uploaded to the Getty Images archive in 2008. A clear visual clue that the photograph was not taken in Portland was that the first officer’s shield is marked “Policia”, the Spanish or Portuguese word for police.
The description on the Getty website does not specify the country it was taken in, but another, similar image uploaded a few days later by the same photographer says that it was taken in Ecuador. The initials of an Ecuadorian police unit from that time are visible on a third photograph in the set.
The image of the fiery demonstration that the officers seem to float above in the composite shared by the Oregon Republican party turned out to be another image from the free archive site Pexels. It was taken by a Brazilian photographer in 2017.
The Oregon Republican Party explained that they’re bad “memers.”
If this was just a one-off, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning. But the visual propaganda that’s coming out of the DHS and the White House is beyond belief. Look at this:
A revival. Like it’s a religious ceremony.
That’s them talking about deportation raids like they’re hunting animals.
WTF are they talking about? “Nullification, secession, or rebellion?” In America right now? Well, I suppose they are right in one sense. They are nullifying the laws, seceding from the constitution and staging a rebellion against the rule of law. But that’s not what they’re talking about.
This propaganda is flooding social media all day, every day. It’s all over Fox News and the other right wing cable nets. It’s poisoning our society and I don’t think we are fully comprehending just how toxic this is and how much it’s affecting the public. The whole point is to bombard us with this crap relentlessly until it’s totally normal to have these masked, cos-playing, robo-cop, thugs roaming the streets and, even worse, to feel completely impotent to do anything about it.
This is your tax dollars at work, America.