The Caption Wrote the Alliance

A reel from the page Osaslugo, posted September 13. The caption says communism and Islamism are teaming up to ruin the country, and that the way to stop it is to turn back to God. A crescent and a finger sit on top of the whole thing: “They need to learn from him.” Facebook’s title on the share still read 2,700 views and 32,000 reactions. The counter on the video, when this was pulled, was about 273,000 views. The card over the first half says “He Never Forgot What Republicans Did for Poland.”

That half is Dominik Tarczyński, the Polish member of the European Parliament, born in Poland in 1979, which means he was a child when the party still ran the country. He is answering why he is in the United States. He was invited. He came with a passport. He lived under communism. The line that comes next is the one he has given on Fox and elsewhere: it was John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, and he is grateful to the United States, and America has been good to Poland. That is a real history. The pope’s 1979 visit, Solidarity, and American pressure were how Poland got out. Communism there ended in 1989. He is describing an exit, not a merger.

Then the clip cuts. A different man, in a car, in a black cap, takes over, and he is not talking about Poland. “One of the biggest problems we’re facing today is Muslims from Islamic countries” who “come here and bring the Sharia law with them.” They want, he says, to “turn America into the dump they came from.” If you are here, “we’re offering you something better,” and the reason is “we believe in Jesus here. We have the real God of the Bible.” If “we turn to your false religion, we’ll turn into a hellhole just like where you came from.” No name. No country. No statute. Every person from a Muslim country, filed as one project.

Nobody in either half says the two are teaming up. Tarczyński is talking about a system that fell, and about the passport in his pocket. The man in the car is preaching that the faith is the whole of the immigration question. The page put a crescent over both, pointed at a man in a suit who never speaks, and wrote the alliance in the caption. The alliance is the caption.