Below is my column in The Hill on the false “bait boy” story that went viral last week, the latest concoction of the left and an enabling media. It was an all-too-familiar pattern. Even after it was debunked, Gov. Tim Walz was still raising it late last week to paint ICE as soulless, depraved thugs. It simply does not matter that it is untrue in our post-truth political environment.
Here is the opinion:
“I am outraged, and you should be too.” That message from former Vice President Kamala Harris has been a virtual mantra of the Democratic Party for years. For several months, this has meant decrying the imminent death of democracy and our descent into authoritarianism. Now, it means falsely claiming that ICE “kidnapped” or “arrested” a five-year-old boy and used him as “bait” to catch someone.
The “bait boy” story is actually the latest clickbait hoax in our “Age of Rage.”
Five years ago, Harris was expressing the same call for outrage over the false story of Border agents whipping migrants in Texas. She expressed disgust over the “horrible and deeply troubling” scenes reminiscent of the slave period.
It quickly became a pile-on, with the media spreading the false account. Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) described the incident as “worse than what we witnessed in slavery” and “white supremacist behavior.”
President Biden threw the agents under the bus, publicly expressing disgust over their conduct and promising punishment before any investigation had occurred: “It was horrible what to see, as you saw — to see people treated like they did: horses nearly running them over and people being strapped. It’s outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay.”
The media continued to repeat the false account, even as many of us pointed out that the publicly available video showed the story was demonstrably untrue. It did not matter. It fit the narrative on the left, and the agents were left under investigation for more than a year before being cleared of the “whipping” charges.
After the false story was exposed, the media just shrugged and went on to the next gotcha story.
As for this new hoax, Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.) declared the incident to be “the worst of the damn worst” in a video on X. Craig, a candidate for Senate, accused federal officers of taking the boy to “use him to lure his father out.”
That is false. According to reports, the father was spotted in public and fled, abandoning the boy. Like Harris, Craig reminded citizens that “this is a time where we should all be outraged. If this doesn’t pierce through your humanity, as a Republican member of Congress, if you can’t speak out about this, then you’ve got no humanity left.”
The key, again, is the requisite outrage. If you are not outraged, you are not human.
It is often said that we are living in a “post-truth” political environment. The term rose to favor due to the 2016 election of President Trump. Oxford Dictionaries specifically cited Trump when it selected the term as word of the year. The irony is that the proof of post-truth politics is often found among those who use it the most on the left, in the media and academia.
The bait boy hoax is particularly disgraceful. It is common to have minor children present during arrests of all kinds. Officers will often try to get family members to take a child rather than put him into child services.
In this case, ICE officers were trying to detain Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, an undocumented Ecuadorian national, when he bolted and left behind his five-year-old child, Liam Conejo Ramos.
Rather than leave the child in the freezing cold on the street, the officers took the child to his home to get his mother to take him in. She refused to open the door despite agents reportedly saying that she would not be detained. They proceeded to take the boy to McDonald’s, play his favorite music, and take care of him. He was never arrested. They also did not send him into detention. According to ICE, his father asked for the boy to be allowed to stay with him at a detention facility, and ICE agreed.
One can have good-faith objections to immigration enforcement policies. The Trump administration has made it a priority to deport the millions of undocumented migrants allowed into the country under the Biden administration. That is what Trump pledged to do in his campaign.
Post-truth politics and post-truth journalism are designed to fuel rage — to give people license to say and do things that they would not ordinarily say or do.
Even nurses this week have joined in the hate-fest against ICE and the administration. In New York, an injured NYPD officer and his colleagues were treated rudely by nurses when they were mistaken for ICE officers.
In Florida, a nurse named Lexie Lawler at the Baptist Health Boca Raton Regional Hospital directed her rage at White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, who is expecting her second child. Lawler posted that “As a labor and delivery nurse, it gives me great joy to wish Karoline Leavitt a fourth-degree tear. I hope you f——- rip from bow to stern and never s— normally again, you c—.” Like the ICE agents, Leavitt is not treated as a person but some Golem who can be joyfully and righteously harmed.
There is a strange aspect to rage addictions. Many on the left will use false stories to virtue signal, then unleash the most unvirtuous attacks. The greatest irony is that these individuals are doing precisely what they accuse ICE of doing. They are using this five-year-old as bait — clickbait — to fuel protests and outrage.
The call for outrage is meant to strip away the humanity of ICE agents, who are portrayed as having no sympathy or concern for a child. Indeed, the use of this child by protesters strips him of his humanity. He was as much of a prop as the ICE agents were.
The bait boy hoax does show that Harris and Craig may be right about one thing: “This is a time where we should all be outraged.”
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the author of the forthcoming “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution,” which will be released on Feb. 3 as part of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Leave it to the MSN… Just liars.
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Alex Pretti has been all over the news since he was shot while engaged with Customers and Border Protection officers in Minneapolis. The fury over CBP and ICE in the dysfunctional city has leftists attempting to elevate the armed insurgent’s status to a combination of martyr and saint.
MS NOW took their brainwashing to the next level by adding beautification to the mix. They heavily enhanced his headshot and displayed the new and improved Pretti on Nicolle Wallace’s show.
ICE can debunk this instantly – release the video recordings from their body cameras.
What if you are wrong?
It’s facetious. ICE doesn’t record with body cameras. They don’t want to capture any evidence of what they do.
Leftist Wall Street Journal Doubts ‘Official Story’
The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal is pushing back on the federal government’s account of the shooting death of Alex Pretti during a confrontation with immigration authorities in Minneapolis over the weekend.
The Journal, in an editorial published Sunday, called the incident “the worst … to date in what is becoming a moral and political debacle for the Trump Presidency.”
“Videos of an event aren’t always definitive, but this is how it looks to us,” the newspaper wrote. “Pretti attempted, foolishly, to assist a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by agents. Multiple agents then tackled Pretti, and he had a phone in one hand as he lay on the ground. An agent discovered a concealed gun on Pretti, and disarmed him. An agent then shot Pretti, and multiple shots followed.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5706476-wall-street-journal-trump-administration-alex-pretti/?tbref=hp
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When Turley wrote this column he seemed to think most of the country saw this shooting from a Fox News perspective. Yet the Wall Street Journal is owned by the same family as Fox News. And the WSJ sees this shooting from a completely different view.
Should we now believe the WSJ has lost its editorial mind? Or should we conclude that Turley was a little too quick in defending the Border Patrol’s actions here? According to a You Gov poll taken yesterday, 48% felt the Alex Pretti shooting was unjustified while only 20% thought it was warranted.
WSJ is leftist ?????????
Do you understand that the Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Everything on the editorial page has to be approved by him.
He also owns the NY Post, which ran a similar editorial.
. PRETTI IS JUST ANOTHER PROP JUST LIKE THE 5 YEAR OLD CHILD FOR ORGANIZED TO USE.
IF Walz, Ellison, the police chief cared about these people they would have ordered the Minneapolis police to do mob control AFTER GOOD’S SELF INFLICTED DEATH.
These little people are pawns easily manipulated. They’ve obviously been trained to disrupt for the thieves, frauds, murderers as they laugh at the chaos and steal your money, your children, your lives.
How you canNOT see that is stunning.
How unfortunate are we to be in the hands of rock bottom organized mobsters.
Hannity schlock–> me and my friends
Levin schlock –> me and him
Nothing good
This column is about the little boy, not Alex Pretti.
. Miss Laura, that’s not clickbait. It’s CHICKBAIT.
What do you want to discuss? His mother didn’t care? His reckless father abandoned him? DJT offered 3,000 dollars. If mom and dad applied separately that’s 6,000. 6,000 will resettle a person in Mexico.
The child is darling. Any chick thinks that and dems got a bunch of empathy?
@Jonathan Turley, what’s the possibility of launching a lawsuit against Governor Walz and Mayor Frey that argued their words and actions lead to the death of Minnesota citizens? And even if it ultimately failed, would a lawsuit possibly deter future politicians? Say a GoFundMe effort?
President Trump says he had very good conversations with Waltz and Frey.
I don’t think he has good conversations unless he gets what he wants.
But why the sudden change?
This might have something to do with it.
https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2026/01/26/link-to-walzs-administration-in-anti-ice-signal-chats-n2198511
A major Signal chat operation to obstruct federal law enforcement has been penetrated and at least one member has/is working with Waltz.
Bad to be caught up in a likely criminal conspiracy like that. Might make one humble and conciliatory.
Trump says he has good conversations when he loses badly. That way when that is exposed he can claim the other side poisoned the deal, a good deal, the best deal, a deal like no one has ever seen before. He even created the term “deal” and no one had ever heard of it before.
“He even created the term “deal” and no one had ever heard of it before.”
Truly?
Ever hear of this? “Let’s Make a Deal,” a television game show begun in the early ’60s. Trump had nothing to do with it.
They aren’t sending their best anymore, and even their best wasn’t good enough.
I was mocking Trump’s claims about being the first to use words, such as “groceries” and “affordability.”
Yet you offered zero proof to back that up.
Another lie by Ano.
Don Surber makes the same point I did but makes it better.
https://donsurber.substack.com/p/the-walz-is-caving-in-on-trump
If they weren’t dangerous, they would be hysterically funny.
OT: I posted this earlier, but the leftists keep accusing others of lying. Miranda Divine’s podcast with Costello reveals an enormous amount of lies stated on this blog by our leftist friends. They continue to lie.
Listen to https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHY8kGYAi5RLEf4OwozbCSlyF3wJoqcOB It’s fabulous.
Turley Writes:
The irony is that the proof of post-truth politics is often found among those who use it the most on the left, in the media and academia.
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On Sunday morning, reporters on many TV networks were poring over multiple videos of the shooting over the weekend of a protester in Minneapolis by immigration agents, trying to understand what happened from slow-mo footage and freeze-frame images.
But on Fox News, the nation’s top-rated cable news network, there was little of that kind of analysis. Instead, most of its hosts, reporters and guests appeared laser focused since the shooting late Saturday morning on supporting the Trump administration’s official narrative: that Alex Pretti, a 37-year old intensive care nurse, brought the violence upon himself.
Fox News’s handling of Mr. Pretti’s killing also highlighted what appears to be its willingness to play down or overlook evidence that could contradict the federal government’s version of events. The coverage made for a jarring disconnect between the narrative found on the conservative network and the one on other outlets.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/business/media/fox-news-minneapolis-shooting.html?smid=url-share
They spent hours examining footage of the event before going on air Sunday morning
^ DNC paid troll. Ignore. ^
NYT 😂 😂 😂
Ano
brought the violence upon himself.
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He sure did. He should have stayed on the sidelines and NOT interfering with the police, but just like Good.
He got in the way and broke the law. His death is sad, but he could have stayed away and protested. But he didn’t.