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I knew something was weird in the world when many of you started breathlessly asking me in comments on unrelated posts whether people in Spain were worried about “the invasion over there.” It was the first I or anyone around me in Madrid, Spain, had heard of an invasion of Spain. Probably because there was no invasion of Spain. Just like there is no invasion of the United States.
That so many of you were deeply worried about said invasion in my new country of Spain speaks to a wholly distinct and very real invasion: The invasion of what was once a free and functional United States press corp by lapdog propagandists who serve only the genocidal white Christian nationalist agenda of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.
American corporate media, across the ideological spectrum and not only on the right, converted last week’s relatively minor migration crisis at the Spanish enclave of Ceuta into anti-brown, anti-Muslim propaganda for the Trump administration’s racist and genocidal immigration agenda. The coverage erased the 72 people who died, which was the only real story you saw about the whole thing here in Spain. American propagandists pretending to be reporters buried the fact that most of the migrants had arrived because of a misunderstandings, and returned to Morocco within two days. The colossal spin of this story served not the truth, but a single hideous function: advancing the white-nationalist border politics of President Trump and his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. They used the “news” out of Spain to terrify their racist base into believing the fantasy replacement theory was not just a threat to themselves, but to Europe.
Here are the facts the coverage displaced. Roughly 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, a Spanish city on the North African coast, over a week beginning July 30. Spanish authorities recovered 72 bodies by Sunday; Morocco reported 11 more. The crossers included families and more than 800 children traveling without parents. Within 48 hours, Spain says, over 48,000 had gone back to Morocco, many voluntarily after finding no food, no shelter, and no way onward. Ceuta is a sealed enclave, not in mainland Spain. A migrant who reaches its beach cannot travel to mainland Spain or anywhere else in Europe without visa and identity checks. The people in the dramatic footage were going nowhere. Moroccan border forces opened the gates and then closed them, a maneuver Madrid reads as diplomatic pressure from Rabat.
Spanish media told that story. And they told it calmly and with compassion for the migrants. Outlets led with the tragic dead, tracked the rising toll, and pressed on accountability at home — a reported clash between the Interior and Defense ministries over an ignored intelligence warning, and the firing of a security officer who released migrant figures before the government was ready to admit them.
The overt distortion (read: whole-ass lies) came, predictably, from the American right. Fox News aired the breach footage on a loop, edited to look like a terrifying invasion of brown people, the usually racist bullshit they push. Miller, the most disgusting human to walk this earth, posted video warning that Democrats “will see your home trampled and stolen by invaders.” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly blamed Spain’s “far-left, globalist policies,” because any opening to make Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez into the next-best whipping boy to Zohran Mamdani, these fuckers take it. Trump, who has never met a brown or black person he did not wish he could buy or sell or simply murder, told his cabinet it looked like an invasion and warned the “same thing is going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected.” He told Fox to “remember that picture.” CNN reported he called the crisis a talking point for the midterms. The spun the hell out of a tragedy because it worked, and it didn’t only work with their base. It worked on many of my own readers.
The rest of American corporate media did the same work in a respectable register. The wire copy and the flagship papers led not with the drowned but with Washington’s reaction, granting the administration’s frame the top of the story and the weight of the headline. The Washington Post reported migrants “overrunning” a Spanish “outpost” and “stirring White House outrage” — the outrage, not the dead, as the news. The verbs did the ideological labor: “storm,” “surge,” “overrun,” “flood.” Dangerdangerdanger. As an actual jouralist, this spin makes me sick. These idiots took a contained event 3,500 miles away, resolved in 48 hours, and presented it to Americans as a glimpse of their own future if non-white, non-Christian people are allowed to FUCKING EXIST. Where the death toll appeared at all, it appeared below the politics. I’m almost surprised they didn’t express dismay that more hadn’t died.
That is how the frame launders reality. “Invasion” is not a description; it is the grammar of the “great replacement,” the white-nationalist fantasy that Western nations are being deliberately overrun by poor, Black and brown, Muslim outsiders. Miller shouted the word; the wire desks translated it into the neutral cadence of objectivity and delivered the same payload. Whether the language was “invaders” or “overrun an outpost,” the corporate press handed the administration a nationwide megaphone with a “genocide ‘R us” logo on the side, and pointed it at footage of Africans in the water.
The alignment ran deeper than a news cycle. A recent nonbinding congressional report described Ceuta and the enclave of Melilla as territories “administered by Spain, located in Moroccan territory” — endorsing Rabat’s claim in the same year Washington moved to make Morocco its top military and intelligence partner in Africa. The U.S. establishment mourned Spain’s border and questioned Spain’s title to it in the same breath.
Seventy-two people who believed they had a chance at a better life are dead, killed in the most horrific of ways, and all my birth country’s press corp and government can see is a fucking “invasion” that does not exist. A French woman with family in Morocco told Reuters she watched women carry two-month-old infants into the sea to die. That is the event. That’s what actually happened. Something tragic and scary, for the opposite reasons your press corp told you about. Everything American media stacked on top of it — the invasion, the warning, the midterm talking point — was a story told about those bodies by an industry that needed them to be a threat rather than the dead.
Make no mistake about it. This is the behavior of genocidal, racist empire. It was true 400 years ago. And it’s true now.
Please. For the love of God. Stop falling for it.
I’ll sign off by answering the question a few of you asked me, about this event. You asked me if I was scared. If the people in Spain were worried. The answer is yes. I am scared. And the people in Spain are worried. But not because desperate mothers in Africa took a deep breath and held their infants and walked into the sea with the biggest of prayers on their lips. We are scared and worried because the United States of America is run by dangerous sociopathic racists and liars, who are a threat to the entire planet.
This was a planned information operation by American agents , perhaps with the collusion of the Moroccan government. You don’t get 60000 people showing up at the gate in trucks, buses and other vehicles believing the social media spread misinformation that getting too Ceuta gives them access to Europe and a better life. Even as the misled people were showing up the US administration and the Spanish right wing party were broadcasting their lies. No time lag. They were ready in advance. Trump wants to oust all governments in Europe who are standing up for their people and democracy. He is actively supporting right wing fascist parties throughout Europe and is actively working to destabilize these countries.
Spain is one of the few European countries who has been critical of Israels genocide in Gaza. Interesting how these things seem to happen to groups who speak out against Israel.