Logic alone often doesn’t make a strong enough impact to change somebody’s mind, so it’s natural and even smart to find stories with an emotional impact to make your point.
It’s a rhetorical technique that is essential to persuasion, for good or ill, and it certainly isn’t a tool used exclusively by one side of the political aisle. Sometimes its use is legitimate, and sometimes it is emotional manipulation, but it is often very effective so it will be used until the human race dies out because it answers the question, “Why do I care?”
For instance, while it is true that performing disfiguring, dangerous, and often life-threatening surgery to treat a psychological condition such as “gender-affirming care” is malpractice no matter the age of the “patient,” almost all the argument is about the ghouls who “treat” children because we care deeply about children who cannot rationally consent, and care less about adults because they chose to undergo the treatment.
In both cases, what was done was wrong, but we care more about the kids than the adults.
Democrats tend to make emotional appeals central to their arguments more frequently because, ideologically, their pitch is that they are the defenders of victims. When there are too few cases of actual victims, they have a nasty tendency to invent them. You see that all the time with racial hoaxes, for instance, which are used to create the impression that MAGA folks are roaming the streets throwing bleach on black people and putting nooses around their necks.
Immigration is now the hot issue, and Democrats are swimming upstream on the issue, so they desperately look for and create out of whole cloth sob stories to short-circuit the rational faculties of people who might be skeptical, but who are persuadable, or to keep their base in a constant state of outrage.
For example, the case of Sae Joon Park, a Green Card holder who served in the US military.
Which is a travesty, honestly. Honorable discharge should include any help needed in gaining citizenship. It’s another way we’re failing our veterans.
— Kevin Stephenson (@jackrabbit1007) December 11, 2025
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was hit with a “gotcha” moment, being used by the Democrats to undermine her credibility, trying to imply that she is a liar. It hits all the right notes, and really only has one flaw: it is not true. Not that this flaw matters to the people pushing the hoax, because their audience tends to believe that emotional truth should trump reality.
Their claim, made in a Congressional hearing, is that Homeland Security deported Sae Joon Park despite having honorably served in the military, even suffering a wound in Panama.
pic.twitter.com/N4wJlneG86
Pure showmanship
Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) confronts DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, denying veteran deportations before connecting live to Army veteran Sae Joon Park, who self-deported to South Korea— James Cohle (@TheJimmyBrief) December 12, 2025
Americans as a whole hold veterans in very high regard, which is why the Seditious Six used their status as veterans to give emotional punch to their propaganda campaign to undermine faith in the president. So when we hear that a soldier was deported, our instinct is to believe that an injustice was committed; when somebody serves, they deserve special treatment. We have special courts for veterans, giving them more latitude in criminal cases and extending benefits reserved for them. We give them preference in employment and extend government contracts to them at least partly based on their status as veterans.
So what about Sae Joon Park, and why did Noem “lie” about not deporting him?
Sae Joon Park was ordered deported during the Obama administration after being convicted and serving jail time for a variety of felonies, including drug possession (crack), assault and jumping bail.
He also wasn’t deported by DHS.
He left the country on his own when it became… https://t.co/gpZWrWIwuQ
— 🐺 (@LeighWolf) December 11, 2025
Well, she didn’t. Sae Joon Park was not deported, and Homeland Security didn’t even put him on the deportation line. Barack Obama did, after he committed felonies during his term.
For 55-year-old U.S. Army veteran Sae Joon Park, this was the hardest moment of his life. Not getting shot in combat. Not the years battling post-traumatic stress disorder or addiction. Not prison. It was leaving the U.S., a country he called home for nearly five decades.
On Monday, Park, a green-card holder, self-deported to South Korea. His removal order was the result of charges related to drug possession and failure to appear in court from over 15 years ago — offenses that, he said, stemmed from years of untreated PTSD.
Park’s story reflects both the challenges of life after combat and the perils that noncitizen veterans face if caught in the legal system — realities made harsher amid the Trump administration’s push for record deportations.
“ I can’t believe that this is happening in America,” Park told NPR in an interview prior to his departure. “That blows me away, like a country that I fought for.”
Sae Joon Park left the country voluntarily, presumably because he wanted the opportunity to re-enter the United States legally rather than be deported under the Obama deportation order. As with claims that Homeland Security is deporting American citizens illegally, the facts contradict the claims. When an illegal alien mother is deported, she naturally takes her infant with her, and since that infant is a citizen, they are leaving the country. They are not being deported, though; their mother is, and she is bringing her child voluntarily and rightly.
Throughout his 20s and 30s, he battled a crack cocaine addiction. One night in New York, while meeting up with a dealer, police appeared and arrested Park. Later, he skipped one of his court hearings.
“I just couldn’t stay clean,” he said. “So finally when the judge told me, ‘Don’t come back into my court with the dirty urine,’ which I knew I would, I got scared and I jumped bail.”
Park was charged with possession of a controlled substance and bail jumping, which derailed his chances of naturalization or getting relief from a deportation order.
Park said for a long time, citizenship was not a priority because he did not fully grasp the consequences of remaining a noncitizen. Although the U.S. offers expedited naturalization for those who serve honorably in the U.S. military for at least one year, or a single day during wartime, Park was discharged before he had served 12 months and the invasion of Panama was not classified as a period of hostility.
The current administration didn’t inform Park that he was no longer legally in the country. The deportation order is over a decade old and stemmed from committing multiple felonies and, apparently, a lack of desire to become a citizen. As for not knowing the consequences of breaking the law as a Green Card holder, that’s obviously bunk. He certainly has known that for 15 years, and no doubt it was all explained to him when he enlisted, if not before. His parents certainly knew.
Whatever. Personally, I wouldn’t make deporting Park a priority because he has apparently cleaned up, but that isn’t the point. What is the case is that the Democrats are lying to pull our heartstrings, and that is disgusting.
But all too common. We often see videos of illegal immigrants being manhandled to pull our heartstrings, but the videos cut out their resisting arrest, and often the assaults on ICE or CBP agents that sparked the conflict. If you leave out the crime, the use of force looks excessive.
The debate over immigration policy is not, in itself, illegitimate. If somebody wants to argue that open borders are a good policy, or that anybody who entered illegally should be able to stay, have at it.
But if your arguments rest on lies and hoaxes, you are a scumbag.
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