Before the Trump presidency, the media might have hesitated to hype a story about illegal immigrants who drag a sickly child through the desert, then retain advocates and lawyers who blame her death on the country they tried to enter. But since any stick will do against Trump, CNN and company couldn’t resist peddling that outrageous storyline.

American border officials had in fact gone to great expense and trouble to chopper the Guatemalan child to a hospital and provide the best possible care to her. But you would have never known that from the headlines. Most of the headlines portrayed the child dying in American “custody” — a headline that makes about as much sense as “Victim Fails to Save Mugger’s Life.” The child’s cardiac arrest, dehydration, and septic shock was due to the deprivation of water and food in parental, not American, custody.

Yet the media has spent days giving open-borders hacks a platform to blame the child’s death on the Trump administration. Commentaries have poured forth about the cruelty of a government that uses the “desert as a weapon.” The Washington Post published an Op-Ed with the headline, “We warned DHS that a migrant child could die in U.S. custody. Now one has.” Even though the seven-year-old hadn’t died in a “family detention center” but in the desert with her father, the piece rattled on about the lack of “pediatric providers” at border facilities.

Such twisted polemics are now daily fare in the media, which caters almost exclusively to America-last liberals eager to hear about the imaginary transgressions of their government against foreigners. Policies once so obvious both parties took them for granted are suddenly treated as red-hot “controversies” that cry out for Congressional hearings. The cheapest of cheap shots are quoted reverentially by the press, such as Hillary Clinton’s ludicrously unfair tweet, “There are no words to capture the horror of a seven-year-old girl dying of dehydration in U.S. custody. What’s happening at our borders is a humanitarian crisis.”

In this hopelessly demagogic climate that idolizes the illegal immigrant, Tucker Carlson was bound to get into trouble for speaking indisputable truths about the mess on the border. Liberals worked themselves up into a lather this week over his comment that unregulated mass immigration makes America “poorer and dirtier and more divided.” The left’s bully-and-intimidation lobby immediately moved into action, demanding that companies “boycott” Carlson’s show. This has resulted in the Kabuki dance of advertisers pretending to agree with the boycott while simply moving their advertisements to other Fox programs until the inane protest peters out. The boycott is a badge of honor for Carlson, whose sharpness has turned him into an object of obsession for an unnerved liberal elite. Too afraid to debate him, they are reduced to boycott threats and nervous satire, which always grow in proportion to a conservative’s effectiveness.

This nontroversy is so juvenile and dumb it is not even worth unpackaging. Carlson clearly didn’t call immigrants “dirty,” but Emma Lazarus, the poet whom liberals quote so worshipfully, did. Maybe her line about immigrants as the “wretched refuse of your teeming shore” will have to be expunged from high school textbooks.

In between showing images from the trash piles of immigrant-besieged Tijuana, the media played dumb about Carlson’s comment. Carlson put his finger on the game at work: “precisely because [my comment] is so obviously true, saying it out loud is a threat. Our immigration policy exists for the profit and the comfort of a relatively tiny number of people. Everybody else gets shafted. Meanwhile, the people profiting from the policy don’t want the rest of us to think about it too much. They want us just to mouth the empty platitudes and move on. ‘Nothing to see here. Shut up and go away.’ Those who won’t shut up get silenced.”

The left is always on the hunt to find truth-tellers and punish them. It operates not by persuasion but by power. Even when it is a political minority, it acts like a majority, dictating to everyone from duly elected presidents to popular talk show hosts what they can and can’t say. Last-place hosts on cable, such as the puffed-chest phony Chris Cuomo (who gravely informed his audience that he doesn’t regard Carlson as a fellow “journalist”), try to convince everyone that they speak from the commanding heights of power. In truth, they speak for a shrinking, deluded elite, who listen to sophomoric podcasts about the glories of illegal immigration and the dangers of walls while they drive home safely past the gates of their mansions.