Pravda: Mom Kills Daughter, Trump to Blame

Surprisingly, this spin on a story ranks only #2 in the rankings this week. 

#1 I wrote about yesterday, in which I learned that Trump was responsible for the heart attack of an obese Social Security employee with chronic heart disease and hypertension because he didn’t respect her enough. 

But this spin is about as insane. 

LA mom drowned her 7-year-old daughter in bathtub after falling into depression over immigration status, fiancé says https://t.co/yqdxjtG4ex pic.twitter.com/zrie32BOOz

— New York Post (@nypost) April 17, 2025

In this bizarre tale, The New York Post informs us that a mother with severe mental health problems killed her 7-year-old child because she feared deportation.

I guess she wanted to ensure she could stay in America by getting a life sentence in prison, and went back to her pre-Columbian roots and used child sacrifice to reach her goal. 

The facts of the story are gruesome:

A Los Angeles mother allegedly drowned her 7-year-old daughter in a bathtub after falling into a deep depression in despair over her illegal status in the US, according to her fiancé.

The girl was found unconscious in the tub by first responders at her mother’s apartment in Van Nuys on Friday evening moments after a neighbor recalled hearing a child chillingly scream, “Mommy, please no!,” KABC reported.

Graciela Castellanos, 37, was arrested and later charged with murder after her daughter, whose name has not been released, was declared dead at the scene, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.

Good God. What a horror. Could you imagine being a child and enduring such a foul act as your last moments on our planet? 

What gets weird, though, is the reason we are given for the murder. It wasn’t that the mother–who has a history of severe mental illness–had a psychotic break. It was because Bad Orange Man” is mean to her. 

No, really. It is Trump’s fault. 

Her fiancé, who asked not to be named, told KABC that he believes Castellanos was triggered into killing the girl after becoming depressed after learning she might not become a legal resident in the US.

Castellanos suffers from mental and emotional health problems, which at times forced her to isolate herself and scream until she calmed down — but she was never violent during the episodes, he said.

“First, I want to say that my wife was an almost perfect mom. She never said a bad word, yelled at the girl, didn’t hit her,” he said in Spanish. 

“She was the sweetest mom in the world.

Read that again: “Castellanos suffers from mental and emotional health problems, which at times forced her to isolate herself and scream until she calmed down — but she was never violent during the episodes, he said.”

Somehow, this transmogrifies into an immigration case. Mentally ill illegal immigrant mom kills child in psychotic break because of Trump. 

You have got to be kidding me. 

Only they aren’t, and there actually is a point to piling up these absurd stories. It’s not that the propagandists expect that you will buy that a kindly Social Security worker really died of a heart attack because Donald Trump is mean, or that a mother drowned her child because of his immigration policies. Few people will. 

But the piling up of these stories is supposed to create a stink, and pound the idea that Trump’s cruelty is an established fact and that if only he were kinder, bad things would happen less often. 

Where there is smoke, there’s fire. The storytellers are creating the smoke, but once people hear enough stories like this, a gestalt is created. The facts don’t add up, but a feeling is being created in people susceptible to such things. It’s about changing the Overton Window, not convincing people about any one case. 

The same strategy is used all the time. Think of the “climate change is causing wildfires” narrative. Even if you prove EVERY wildfire has an easily explained origin in bad maintenance of power lines or outright arson, that California’s forest management is horrific, that LA was unprepared for an easily predicted event, the accumulation of stories creates an impression on the impressionable. 

The facts are irrelevant. The accumulated feelings stick. 

The infuriating thing is that it works. Millions of Americans are suddenly furious that a wife-beating MS 13 gang member with a deportation order got…deported. Not because they know anything about the particulars, but because propaganda arsonists started a fire that spread in people’s minds. 

Even a lot of liberty-minded conservatives are incensed over technicalities that would never have occurred to them because the propaganda worked. PROVE that he was a human trafficker. PROVE that he beat his wife. PROVE that he was a gang member. As if that is the standard for deporting an illegal immigrant credibly suspected of all these things, with boatloads of evidence. 

Honestly, you can read the harrowing accounts from his wife about being beaten, and people are still incensed. Tren de Aragua is suddenly the Boy Scouts, too. 

It’s absurd, but the fact is that the accumulation of individually absurd stories does have an effect, and that is the point, not making you believe any one story. People get primed for outrage. 

It’s sickening.