Peggy Noonan is a writer and columnist for the WSJ. Part of her reputation stems from her writing speeches for Reagan and the elder Bush, and for coming up with memorable phrases. Some of these phrases apparently did not work out well for whom she coined them. Read my lips.

In a recent WSJ opinion piece titled How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen – a piece much shared on social media — Noonan enlightens us about the failure of global elites to empathize:

“The larger point is that this is something we are seeing all over, the top detaching itself from the bottom, feeling little loyalty to it or affiliation with it. It is a theme I see working its way throughout the West’s power centers. At its heart it is not only a detachment from, but a lack of interest in, the lives of your countrymen, of those who are not at the table, and who understand that they’ve been abandoned by their leaders’ selfishness and mad virtue-signalling.”

Noonan, presumably to impress on us her status among the well-connected, opens her piece recounting a meeting with “an acquaintance of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor and the conversation quickly turned, as conversations about Ms. Merkel now always do, to her decisions on immigration.” Noonan then recounts Merkel’s announcement in late 2014 that refugees from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere were welcome in Germany, the following influx (net) of more than a million in 2015, the resultant public discussions in Germany about this fact, and the claim that, coming “from such a sturdy, grounded character as Ms. Merkel the decision was puzzling – uncharacteristically romantic about people, how they live their lives, and history itself …”. We learn that the acquaintance of Merkel attributes her puzzling decision to her upbringing as the daughter of a Lutheran minister in East Germany, and as yet another attempt of providing “a kind of counter-statement, in the 21^st century, to Germany’s great sin of the 20^th.”

We learn that, while this was as good an explanation as Noonan heard, there was a fundamental problem with the decision:

“Ms. Merkel had put the entire burden of a huge cultural change not on herself and those like her but on regular people who live closer to the edge, who do not have the resources to meet the burden, who have no particular protection or money or connections. Ms. Merkel, her cabinet and government, the media and cultural apparatus that lauded her decision were not in the least affected by it and likely never would be.”

“Nothing in their lives will get worse. The challenge of integrating different cultures, negotiating daily tensions, dealing with crime and extremism and fearfulness on the street—that was put on those with comparatively little, whom I’ve called the unprotected. They were left to struggle, not gradually and over the years but suddenly and in an air of ongoing crisis that shows no signs of ending—because nobody cares about them enough to stop it.”

Noonan goes on to invoke the Cologne transgressions at last new year’s eve celebrations and Merkel’s adjustment to the considerable political backlash that her policies have brought about (the strong emergence of the AfD and the growing support of other populists such as Seehofer, the head of her own party’s Bavarian branch) and her pleading with her own populace to deal with both the positive and the negative aspects of globalization. Quoting a fellow journalist, Noonan argues: “’This was the chancellor’s … way of acknowledging that various newcomers to the national household had begun to attack her voters at an alarming rate.’ Soon after her remarks, more horrific crimes followed, including in Munich (nine killed in a McDonald’s) Reutlingen (a knife attack) and Ansbach (a suicide bomber).”

Now, it is rather rich that as prominent a megaphone for the global elites as Noonan virtue-signals her compassion for the disenfranchised masses that allegedly have fallen victim to the NIMBY syndrome. For all we know, Noonan got paid royally for her piece and was writing it in a brownstone home in an affluent residential New York City neighborhood.

All that hypocrisy aside, while we have come to expect false and silly claims from presidential candidates in the USA, it is noteworthy that Noonan seems not to check the facts that she parades to make her case. Of the three horrific crimes that she mentions, at best two can be clearly linked to Merkel’s open-door immigration policy (the suicide bomber in Ansbach, and maybe the Reutlingen knife attack, which — while committed by an immigrant asylum seeker from Syria — seems to have been a crime of passion). Importantly, the McDonald’s killings were committed by some kid born in Germany that was as confused and unhinged as some of the school shooters in the USA from which he seems to have taken his cues. Apparently, fact-checking is not Noonan’s thing. Never let the facts get in the way of a story that sells. True journalism, that.

Yes, there is no doubt that the open-door policy was ill-advised, lacked appropriate consultation, and was poorly implemented in particular on the federal level, but the fact is that murders in Germany — currently about 250 annually — have been cut by 40 percent since 2000 and – at least for 2015 — this number has not increased, notwithstanding the influx of the various newcomers to the national household. For all I can tell, Germany is far from falling apart at the seams as some of the hysteric press and social-media responses have tried to suggest.

The Independent — a British newspaper, no less — has argued that Angela Merkel’s open-door immigration policy will protect Germany from terrorism in the long run. It seems that for now things have worked out remarkably well even in the short run, notwithstanding the fact that this policy has been implemented poorly.

While it is way too early to assess all the benefits and costs of the developments in Germany since late 2014, it seems self-evident that Noonan is mostly uninformed about the current state of affairs there. That, unfortunately, seems to be the modus operandi of post-truth journalists like her who are no better than the illiterati and inumerati populating social media.