Last Updated on July 31, 2022, 11:20 AM | Published: July 27, 2022
As our nation learned the hard way through the seemingly interminable Trump Administration, liars are going to lie to our faces with broad, rictus smiles. Whenever possible, U.S. Sen. James Lankford lies without guile, but in his noxious Twitter feed, Lankford preys upon the uninformed and sows confusion by employing Orwellian wordsmithing.
On July 26, Lankford or someone tweeting as him dumped one hell of a fascist doublespeak bomb onto Twitter. The best way to break down this half-clever lie is sentence by sentence.
“The Biden Admin is allowing a flood of drugs to come over our borders—just this year in the Rio Grande Valley, 144lbs of fentanyl & 27,550lbs of meth have been interdicted,” Lankford tweeted.
Lankford is hoping that a general lack of knowledge about border policies and drug enforcement carries the day for him, as well as our culture’s tendency to skim rather than fully absorb and analyze.
When he writes that the “Biden Admin is allowing a flood of drugs to come over our borders,” he is rightly assuming that people will not think about border jurisdiction. To put it plainly, the U.S. has jurisdiction over the U.S., not Mexico.
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Drug trafficking on the Mexico side of the border is one thing, but once it crosses the border into the United States of America, a new layer of legal penalties fall into place because the U.S. enforces U.S. laws that are broken on U.S. soil, not other countries. It is about as basic as 8th grade civics classes get.
The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) operates multiple offices along the U.S. Mexico border, including locations like Matamoros, Mexico, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas. DEA works bilaterally with the Mexican authorities, but again, the Department of Justice cannot prosecute for the importation of drugs unless actual importation occurred.
Lankford’s mendacity is on full display here for careful readers. When he writes that the multiple pounds of fentanyl and methamphetamine “have been interdicted,” what he is saying is that the drug smugglers got caught and the drugs they intended to sell to the U.S. market were confiscated.
“Interdicted” is a word rarely heard outside of discussions of the drug war. Before I went to college, I was a U.S. Navy Intelligence Specialist (IS2) providing support for patrol squadrons executing drug interdiction operations, among other things. It was only considered “interdiction” if the drug boat was stopped, the criminals arrested and the payload seized.
Lankford’s tweet continued.
“These drugs are overwhelming & killing people in my state,” Lankford wrote.
It is true that fentanyl overdoses have spiked in Oklahoma in recent months, and the state’s meth problem is well documented. But Lankford makes it sound like the drugs he is citing in this tweet made it to Oklahoma. They did not; they were “interdicted.”
Yes, fentanyl and meth are “overwhelming & killing people” in Oklahoma, just not the fentanyl and meth that the DEA stopped within U.S. jurisdiction.
Perhaps it should be noted that, in addition to manufacturing disinformation about how drug enforcement takes place, Lankford is constantly and consistently dragging the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which is staffed with reliably conservative voters.
He regularly posts creepy videos from the border blaming President Joe Biden when people cross the border. What he does not say is that people do not become “illegal immigrants” until they have, in fact, crossed the border illegally. Again, the U.S. cannot prosecute a crime until the crime is committed.
Lankford ended his tweet by writing that “Biden has got to do his job & enforce the law.”
Yes, absolutely. And if you siphon off the sewage Lankford pours over the facts, it appears that Biden is actually doing it.
George Lang has worked as an award-winning professional journalist in Oklahoma City for over 25 years and is the professional opinion columnist for Free Press. His work has been published in a number of local publications covering a wide range of subjects including politics, media, entertainment and others. George lives in Oklahoma City with his wife and son.
