On October 16, Spain’s ABC reported, citing unnamed National Police sources, that about 70% of recent asylum applications from Moroccans who entered Ceuta in late July cite sexual orientation. Breitbart headlined them as Moroccans who “Invaded”. Read the headline as a sentence and its subject is a nationality: ‘70% of Moroccans’. Breitbart’s own first paragraph puts the 70% on ‘the asylum requests filed’, and the unnamed police sources behind ABC’s report speak of the most recent ones. Spain’s Interior Ministry has registered about 1,200 applications since late July and decided about 700; some 10,000 people entered and remain. The tell is a percentage whose base changes between the headline and the page. ‘Invaded’ is the loaded verb that does the rest: a crossing becomes an attack. The quote marks around ‘Gay’ then judge every claim before an official has, riding an old habit of the mind: their side’s claims are lies by nature, ours would be weighed one by one. Breitbart’s 12th paragraph reports the police union saying the pattern cannot in itself prove ‘generalized fraud’. Its 14th notes that Morocco jails people for same-sex relations. Police union data counts five orientation claims granted. The coverage has reached Threat Assessment, the stage where a group becomes a danger. Not the Bee files the story under ‘Border Invasion’; RedState’s headline says ‘Most’ and ‘to Exploit’. Each retelling adds no fact, only a bigger enemy. When a crossing reads as an invasion, the parties campaigning on Europe’s southern border have their case made for them. Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, in Ceuta on Thursday, said, as Ceuta Actualidad paraphrases him, that an allegation alone is not enough without objective evidence.
