Cable News: 22 Comparisons of Immigration Policy to the Holocaust, Slavery

News Busters
Jun. 19, 2018

The pundit class have officially snapped over the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance border enforcement policy. Since Friday, the collective breakdown has yielded a total of 22 instances in which cable news commentators compared the separation of parents and children illegally entering the country to World War II-era war crimes and human rights violations.

The Holocaust was invoked 12 times across CNN and MSNBC between June 15 and the 18th, generally in the form of comparisons between DHS detention centers and Nazi concentration camps. There were also six mentions of Japanese-American internment camps, as well as four comparisons to slavery.

On Friday, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough opened Morning Joe with a tasteless Holocaust reference. “Children are being marched away to showers,” he intoned, “just like the Nazis said they were taking people to the showers, and then they never came back. You’d think they would use another trick.”

Over the weekend, CNN political commentator Dave Jacobson threw a miniature tantrum over the policy. On Saturday’s CNN Newsroom during the 10 a.m. hour, he opined, “Donald Trump increasingly looks like Hitler in Nazi Germany.” The following day, he appeared again on Newsroom in the afternoon to embellish on his already hysterical take: “Increasingly, Donald Trump is turning this nation into Nazi Germany and turning these [detention centers] into concentration camps.”

Read More