Take Monday’s
Will Cain Show on Fox News. Rep.
Maxwell Frost came on to talk about
Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who, through a bureaucratic miracle of incompetence, was deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
Frost, a Democrat, used the moment to raise a bigger red flag:
Donald Trump, he said, has floated the idea of deporting “homegrowns” — i.e., American citizens.
Cain, befuddled, hit pause. Deporting Americans? That’s quite a claim.
He asked Frost for a quote, a source, anything concrete.
Frost said Trump made the comment in the Oval Office, standing next to El Salvador’s president, and invited viewers to do a little Googling: “Trump homegrown deporting.”
Now, full disclosure: I like
Will Cain. When my book
Filthy Rich Politicianscame out, he was
one of the few high-profile conservatives willing to talk to me about it — and he was fair, even gracious.
And that’s exactly why this moment matters. Because if someone as smart and capable as Cain hadn’t heard Trump say this — and I believe he sincerely hadn’t — that tells us something deeply broken about the information ecosystem he’s operating in.
This isn’t about Cain. It’s about the epistemic closure that lets a national news host plausibly miss a former president suggesting that we ship U.S. citizens to a foreign prison system better known for gang tattoos and extrajudicial beatings than due process.
I'm willing to bet that until Frost appeared on the network, your average Fox viewer honestly had no clue.
And if that kind of thing can slip through the cracks, what else is being filtered out?
The problem? Millions of Americans are forming opinions and making political decisions based on (I’m being generous here)
incomplete information.