One of the major problems of main stream media is this desire to get “both sides” of an argument together and treat them both as equally reasonable or factual ignoring the reality that sometimes one side literally has no viable leg to stand on. Typically when this occurs after every mouth fart of Donald Trump’s. In this case it happened as CNN turned to former Reagan Official Jeffry Lord, who was previously pwned by Resa Aslan over his distorted views on Islam, and the results are commonly catastrophic. In this case he was defending Trump’s call to ban all Muslim migration to the U.S. by calling back to a Presidential order made by President Roosevelt that detained German, Italian and Japanese immigrants as “enemy aliens.”
“What he’s suggesting is to have a pause, have a better understanding of what’s going on,” Lord replied. “As I say, Franklin [Delano] Roosevelt did some version of this. This is very old stuff. This has nothing to do with Japanese-American internment camps, which were immoral.”
“What does that even even mean?” [Anderson] Cooper asked. “To put out a policy statement saying, ‘We should stop this until we figure out what’s going on.’ What does that mean?”
He went even further with this wild analogy to proclaim that those who are against Trump here would somehow be against the efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr in 1964.
As Cooper tried to send the show to commercial, Lord replied, “This is like saying if Martin Luther King led these marches that we were gonna increase the number of white segregationists. That’s crazy.”
Yeah, well there was a backlash against Dr. King. That backlash was part of the reason the Confederate flag was still flying over the South Carolina state capitol grounds until just last year. It’s also why he was murdered.
On top of all that Lord is also wrong that Roosevelt’s orders had nothing to do with internment, they in fact, led directly to it.
Lord’s statements begin at 6:40.
Lord has repeatedly referred to Presidential proclamations 2525, 2526 and 2527 by President Roosevelt, this is what they did.
Immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Presidential Proclamations 2525, 2526, and 2527 to authorize the United States to detain allegedly potentially dangerous enemy aliens. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies arrested thousands of suspected enemy aliens, mostly individuals of German, Italian, or Japanese ancestry, living throughout the United States.
The Department of Justice oversaw the processing of the cases and the internment program. Although many were released or paroled after hearings before a local alien enemy hearing board, for many the adversarial hearings resulted in internment that, in a few cases, lasted beyond the end of World War II. Of those interned, there was evidence that some had pro-Axis sympathies. Many others were interned based on weak evidence or unsubstantiated accusations of which they were never told or had little power to refute. Often families, including naturalized or American-born spouses and children, of those interned voluntarily joined them in internment.
Furthermore, on the basis of hemispheric security, the United States offered to intern allegedly dangerous enemy aliens living in Latin American countries and even recommended which enemy aliens should be interned. Over fifteen Latin American countries accepted the offer and eventually deported a total of over 6,600 individuals of Japanese, German, and Italian ancestry, along with some of their families, to the U.S. for internment. Few, if any, of those deported received any sort of a hearing so many did not know the specific reasons for their deportation. Often these individuals were deported based on hearsay or for other political reasons.
By the end of the war, over 31,000 suspected enemy aliens and their families, including a few Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, had been interned at Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) internment camps and military facilities throughout the United States.
So when Lord says Trump’s lunatic idea is just “fine” because Roosevelt did something worse, a sentiment that Trump later himself echoed while later arguing with Chris Cuomo, and that that worse thing had nothing to do with “internment” he’s wrong on both counts. It’s was wrong then, it’s still wrong now.
If you have the stomach for it, this is Trump’s interview on CNN from this morning.
The conspiracy theory laden stream of unconsciousness that comes spilling out of Trump’s piehole is in response to Cuomo’s calm recitation of facts is truly hard to believe, and also tragically sad.