President Donald Trump’s administration has a short-term plan to house illegal immigrant children traveling with an adult family member or guardian. While historically this news has barely blipped on the MSM’s radar during Democratic administrations, the Resistance mainstream media wants to make you angry about it because a Republican president decided to use a military base that was once a Japanese internment camp.
USA Today was just one of many news outlets that breathlessly reported the news:
The Trump administration plans to house up to 1,400 unaccompanied migrant children in an Oklahoma military base that once served as a Japanese internment camp during World War II.The base, Fort Sill, held 350 Japanese Americans following the 1941 attacks on Pearl Harbor. Over 120,000 American citizens of Japanese descent were sent to internment camps during WWII over perceived security concerns.The move, which was first reported by the Associated Press, was confirmed to USA TODAY by Evelyn Stauffer, spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families (ACF).
It’s not until the fifth paragraph, located below the large video ad on the page, that the newspaper tells you that this military base was also used by the Obama administration to house unaccompanied illegal immigrant minors in 2014:
This is not the first time the federal government has used military bases for migrant housing. The Obama administration used Fort Sill and other bases to house migrant children from Central America during a 2014 influx but closed the facilities following a public backlash.
Predictably, opportunistic Democrats pounced and seized on these stories:
In addition to TIME/AP and USA Today, other mainstream media outlets rushed to join in on sensationalizing news reports about the base housing the children. Here are just two of many examples:
The Hill was one of a few news outlets that covered the Obama story in 2014. Strangely enough, that report mentioned nothing about internment camps:
The Washington Free Beacon‘s Alex Griswold analyzed the media’s coverage of the “former internment camp” then versus now and came up with results that should surprise no one (bolded emphasis added):
Per Lexis Nexis, there have been tens of thousands of mentions of “Fort Sill” in English language news sources in the past few decades, literally too many for the service to count. Exactly six mentioned both “Fort Sill” and “Japanese internment,” and all six stories were about Japanese internment. That Japanese internment is a defining moment in Fort Sill’s history, warranting prominent mention in stories even having nothing to do with Japanese internment, appears to be a notion born sometime in the past 24 hours, evidently by a reporter with an agenda, a deadline, and access to Wikipedia.It’s obvious why the focus is where it is. The Trump administration is detaining thousands of migrant children, that is bad, and just like Japanese internment. Got ‘im![…]Obama’s 2014 move appears identical to Trump’s today. And yet, CBS’s coverage of the children being held in Fort Sill didn’t mention Japanese internment. Neither did The Hill‘s. Neither did TIME‘s. Needless to say, most of the other outlets running with the “Japanese internment” angle didn’t even bother to cover Obama sending kids to Army bases, and certainly didn’t muster outrage at the prospect. If the irony and bad optics of detaining migrants at Fort Sill is so obvious as to deserve top billing, one wonders why it escaped the media’s notice when a Democrat was doing it.
Not only that, but since the mainstream media are so interested in giving readers history lessons on the military base used as an internment camp during WWII, why don’t their lessons extend a little further to note that it happened under a Democrat president’s administration? Odd, that.
This latest example of faux outrage is like the “Trump administration is using cages to detain children!!!” narrative from 2018 where the mainstream media used images of kids in cages at detention centers from 2014 and 2016 to bash Trump.
It’s also reminiscent of the mainstream media’s false smear of President Trump over his comments on the 2017 Charlottesville riots. People have debunked their lies over and over, but they keep marching on with them as though they’ve done nothing wrong in painting such an inflammatory picture. Democrats, naturally, have run with the debunked story, too.
You’d think firefighter journalists who spend significant chunks of time on social media and TV talk shows demanding that Trump tone down his “inciteful” rhetoric would do the same thing, wouldn’t you? But they don’t, even though they have a responsibility and duty to report things fairly and accurately to inform readers rather than unnecessarily fanning the flames.
Trump knows the media by and large refuse to practice what they preach, which I suspect is one of the reasons why he threw the one-sided rules for presidential civility out the window long ago.
What’s the real story here? It’s not that these children will reside in a former internment camp, and it’s not that the Trump administration lacks a long-term plan to house unaccompanied minors. It’s that Democrats are deliberately using stall tactics to delay action on Trump’s request for $4.5 billion in funding for the crisis:
The punchline, by the way, is that the administration is having to reconfigure existing facilities partially because congressional Democrats refuse to give Trump money to build new detention spaces. They don’t want people detained in the first place so they’ve choked off funding. Fort Sill is the stopgap solution DHS has been forced to come up with. Just a few days ago, the NYT begged Dems not to be so recalcitrant and to appropriate money to ease the humanitarian problem at the border, at least. If the media’s truly concerned about a military base — sorry, I mean a former Japanese internment camp — being used to house illegals, they should lean on Pelosi.
Indeed.
[Featured image via YouTube]
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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