The New York Times gets ever more Orwellian in its effort to rewrite the story of Kilmar Abrego García's tattoos

Who needs Big Brother when you have Big Media? The odds are 1.68 million to 1 that he wound up with symbols spelling MS-13 on his knuckles by accident. But anything's possible, right?

M, marijuana leaf

S, smiley face

1, cross

3, skull with three prominent holes

What’s it spell? The New York Times can’t say.

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(Embarrassing the legacy media with the truth since 2021.)

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Democratic politicians no longer deny Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the illegal immigrant deported to El Salvador on March 15, is part of the brutal MS-13 criminal gang. But the legacy media insists otherwise — and is waging a bizarre campaign to convince readers to ignore the evidence in front of their own eyes.

Like other recent media efforts to rewrite reality, such as the Times’s decision to bury the truth about Army Capt. Rebecca Lobach’s responsibility for January’s Washington, D.C. plane crash, trying to make a hero of Garcia is unlikely to work. But legacy outlets still can’t see these games do nothing but damage their credibility.

To be clear, I believe Garcia deserves due process. Ironically, the Trump administration could have sent him anywhere except El Salvador. I wish the administration would just bring him back (and then deport him again). Nothing will reduce the public’s current support for tight borders faster than the specter of people, American citizens in particular, being wrongly deported.

But this question isn’t about whether Garcia should get due process. It’s about how the media is trying to deify him. Soon after Garcia was sent home in March, the Atlantic and other outlets had created a narrative: he was an innocent, hard-working father of a five-year-old autistic boy. He was a proud American to be, a young man who had escaped El Salvador’s gangs for a better life.

The truth is considerably uglier:

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In 2020 and again in 2021, Garcia’s wife accused him in court filings of hitting her and hurting her kids:

According to the petition filed by Jennifer Vasquez… Garcia verbally abused her, kicked her, slapped her, shoved her, mentally abused her kids, locking them in their bedroom while they cried, and detained Vasquez against her will…

This newly released petition was filed in 2020, prior to the petition Vasquez filed against Garcia 2021. In that filing, Vasquez claimed he bruised, punched, and scratched her…

Then, in 2022, Garcia was stopped in Tennessee for speeding. He said he was driving from Texas to his home in Maryland. But none of the eight passengers with him had any luggage, leading the officer stopped him to suspect “a human trafficking incident.” After over an hour of questioning, he was let go.

This history raises an obvious question: what exactly did an illegal immigrant have to do during the Biden Administration to get deported? Not attacking your wife seems like a fairly low bar, but it is one that Kilmar Abrego Garcia could not meet.

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Then there is the allegation Garcia was part of MS-13, a brutal gang founded in the 1980s in Los Angeles by refugees from El Salvador’s civil war. By 2006, MS-13 had 10,000 American members, and was a target of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In 2019, Garcia was arrested alongside two known members of MS-13. A police source accused him of being a member of the gang, though he denied the allegation.

A fact that makes the tattoos on his left hand… interesting.

The Times article about them includes a remarkably clear picture of them.

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For those of you playing along at home, those include, from left to right:

A seven-pointed leaf instantly recognizable as Marijuana

A basic Smiley face

A cross that is amazingly like a 1

And a skull with 3 large sockets for eyes and nose.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia grew up in El Salvador at a time when MS-13 was among the most powerful organizations of any kind in his country. Yet the media is claiming that he chose these symbols coincidentally.

Right! Here’s some math: 26 letters, 10 numbers, 36 choices in all. 36 to the fourth power equals 1,679,616. ONE combination spells MS-13. That’s the one Garcia picked for his fingers. What are the odds?

Oh yeah, we just figured them out. 1.68 million to 1.

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(Your lottery ticket to the truth. For less than 20 cents a day!)

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But the Times thinks otherwise. In an article this morning headlined: Trump Has Made Claims About Abrego Garcia’s Tattoos. Here’s a Closer Look, it wrote:

Each of the tattoos on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s knuckles is extremely common, but even combined, they are unremarkable, several tattoo experts said.

And according to experts on gang membership, the tattoos that usually signify MS-13 membership are often much clearer in their association with the gang. Many times, they actually say MS-13, those experts said…

‘I can tell you, MS-13 does not equivocate; they don’t leave any ambiguity when it comes to their tattoos.’

MS-13 doesn’t leave any ambiguity. Got it!

Except last week, the Washington Post interviewed the author of a book about MS-13 who claimed Garcia’s tattoos didn’t prove anything because… wait for it… MS-13 members don’t even get tattoos anymore, much less unambiguous ones:

The use of tattoos as displays of affinity and loyalty to the gang has dropped in recent decades after law enforcement officials seized on them to identify members… ‘Younger members of the gang are far less likely to tattoo themselves, at least in any obvious manner.’

So which is it? Is a knuckle tattoo that uses symbols to say MS-13 not obvious enough for an MS-13 gang member, like the Times wrote today? Or too obvious, like the Post wrote last week?

Or maybe - work with me here - a small tattoo using symbols is exactly the choice a gang member who didn’t want to be obvious to law enforcement would make.

So who you gonna believe, the Times and its experts or your lying eyes?

At this point, one almost has to admire the legacy media for its commitment to the bit.