Sawyer Hackett is not a member of the Biden administration. He holds no official position in the Department of Homeland Security or the Customs and Border Patrol. He hosts a podcast and is a senior advisor to Julián Castro, as well as having a modestly small Twitter following he leveraged to accuse several border agents of “whipping” migrants during a caravan crossing last September. It was a claim quickly debunked by an Associated Press video team on scene, but that doesn’t matter now.
The Biden regime marches to the tune of Twitter optics, thanks to the way-too-online tendencies of White House chief of staff Ron Klain and former press secretary Jen Psaki, who seem to be scouring the social media platform on an hourly basis.
Just revisit the following textbook case: Hackett tweeted out photos of border agents ahorse confronting migrants crossing the Rio Grande — and claimed they were holding whips, like slave drivers. “Border patrol is mounted on horseback rounding up Haitian refugees with whips,” he wrote.
US border agents do not carry whips as part of their equipment. Hackett appears to have mistakenly identified horse reins. Yet he never retracted his claim, despite video evidence to the contrary. Again, this doesn’t matter now.
His claim was regurgitated by “reporters” like PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor, who promptly took it to Jen Psaki. The claim was then echoed by several mainstream outlets and reporters. The White House, guided by these interactions, passed the story on to President Biden, who vowed to make the agents pay. A months-long investigation ensued, which culminated in the agents involved being cleared, although the horseback units were abolished. None of this matters either.
Now, per Fox reporter Bill Miselugin, DHS is “preparing to discipline multiple horseback Border Patrol agents who were accused of ‘whipping’ Haitian migrants in Del Rio last summer.”
Melugin went on to state that despite the investigation clearing them, the agents will be charged with “administrative violations.”
Could there be a more crystalline example of the Biden administration setting federal policy according to the whims of Twitter? Perhaps this might partially explain why the person in charge currently sits at a 38.7 approval rating — given that a good majority of the population are not equipped with Twitter accounts.
The Twitter addicts advising the president have made a calculated decision that RTs and courting the good graces of journalists are more important than protecting the agents tasked with the difficult jobs of guarding border communities from bad-faith and evidence-free slights.
Deploying tweets and viral trends to guide policies such as defunding the police has not worked out well for the political left, but it does fuel passion, much as the photos of border agents on horses did.
Even then the truth did not matter to mainstream journalists.
Now border agents who do not carry lariats, as Reuters News Agency claimed, or whips, and did not whip migrants, or trample them or assault them, find themselves disciplined for a series of events that did not happen. But this does not matter to our media — or the Biden administration.
