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White House Fires Back After MSNBC's Scarborough Compares Immigration Policy to Nazis

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When you have to go to the Nazis to criticize someone, unless they’re an actual anti-Semitic fascist, you can be fairly certain that you’re not exactly making a good decision. I figured this would pretty much be a given in the 2010s, but the presidency of Donald Trump has again brought to the fore the specter of the Holocaust and Nuremberg rallies.

The latest public figure to resort to the Nazis is (what a surprise) MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who is convinced that the Trump administration’s policies on families caught immigrating illegally is something straight out of the Third Reich.

During a Friday morning rant, Scarborough went after White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has said that the administration was merely enforcing the law by detaining those caught crossing the border illegally and then putting their children into state custody after 20 days (an Obama-era regulation, it must be noted).

“It’s not the law,” Scarborough said. “This is Donald Trump’s interpretation of the law.”


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nFWIGU8pog

Then Scarborough went into waters where even MSNBC usually won’t tread.

“I know children are being ripped from their mother’s arms, even while they’re being breast-fed. I know children are being marched away to showers, I know they’re being marched away to showers,” Scarborough said, “being told they are just like the Nazis, and said that they were taking people to the showers and then they never came back.

“You’d think they’d use another trick like, ‘Hey, got a slurpee room over there, we’re going to take them to get them a slurpee.’ I mean, that would be better than, ‘We’re marching them in the showers — they’ll be right back,’ and then they never come back.”

If ICE is doing this, it would probably behoove them to stop, although this information has a whiff of the Ferris Bueller 31 Flavors scene about it. Furthermore, Scarborough didn’t seem to acknowledge that the regulation stipulating that ICE can’t detain children for over 20 days came into effect under the Obama administration.

Do you think Joe Scarborough went too far?

It’s worth pointing out that this whole narrative about ICE taking children away seems to have come mostly from a tweet by a Boston Globe reporter who seems to have gotten this information third-hand:

https://twitter.com/lizcgoodwin/status/1005792756726452225

The Nazi comparison didn’t escape the gaze of the White House, which castigated Scarborough for his choice of words.

“It is appalling that Joe Scarborough would compare sworn federal law enforcement officers — who put their lives on the line every day to keep American people safe — to Nazis,” a statement from White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley read. “This is the type of inflammatory and unacceptable rhetoric that puts a target on the backs of our great law enforcement.”

“It is also horribly insulting to the memory of the 6 million Jews who perished in the Nazi Holocaust,” the statement continued. “Not only is Scarborough’s rhetoric shameful, but his facts are categorically false.”

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He also noted that there was no difference between how American citizens and illegal aliens were treated when they broke the law.

“When American citizens break the law, they are separated from their children and prosecuted,” Gidley said. “It’s unclear why Scarborough believes that illegal aliens are entitled to more rights than those afforded to American citizens.”

“While Scarborough is quick to launch into his straight-to-camera outrage over the temporary separation of illegal alien families, he has never shown similar outrage for the permanent separation of American families forever torn apart from their children, who were killed by criminal aliens as a result of Democrats’ open borders policies. If Joe Scarborough actually cared about keeping illegal alien families together, he would use his platform to support the Trump Administration’s efforts to close loopholes in federal immigration law.”

I doubt that last part will be on the agenda of “Morning Joe” anytime soon, but I would hope that Nazi comparisons won’t be, either. It’s one of the few things I can definitively say is below even Joe Scarborough and his morning retinue.

Invoking the Nazis over almost anything is a poor decision. Invoking them over ICE agents who are merely enforcing the law is beyond inappropriate.

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C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014. Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One and football (of both American and world varieties).
Birthplace
Morristown, New Jersey
Education
Catholic University of America
Languages Spoken
English, Spanish
Topics of Expertise
American Politics, World Politics, Culture




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