When Is Mass Murder Not a Big Story?
Answer: When the MSM spots it as trouble for Joe Biden and therefore buries it on the back pages, right around where it put the story of the attempted assassination of a conservative Supreme Court Justice.
When one man, George Floyd, was killed, it led to months of front page stories and became, for a time, America’s leading topic of political and cultural debate. Indeed, it contributed to the title of this newsletter, because it was said to ignite the “reckoning” our country must face about racism. It was also used at ten trillion decibels by the Left to imply that the principal danger to the lives, dignity and well-being of black people is white police malice — a patent falsehood, since the number of blacks murdered by black criminals dwarfs the number killed by white criminals, much less white (or any) police.
Now there’s a different news story — if you can find it. Yesterday, authorities in Texas discovered a tractor trailer near the Mexican border with 53 bodies in it. CBS reports:
Federal law enforcement officials confirmed to CBS News Homeland Security and Justice reporter Nicole Sganga this appears to be the deadliest human smuggling case in modern U.S. history.
Not all of the victims have been identified, and some of the victims could be under 18 years old, county spokesman Tom Peine told reporters….
On Tuesday morning, Mexican Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said on Twitter, citing U.S. authorities, that the victims included 22 Mexicans, 7 Guatemalans and two Hondurans. Investigators are still determining the nationalities of those who died or were hospitalized, Sganga reports.
Three individuals believed to be part of the suspected smuggling conspiracy are being detained by the federal agency Homeland Security Investigations…
Fifty-three human beings, very likely including children, dead, murdered from hours and perhaps days of torturous heat exhaustion and thirst, and the story is not getting anything like the play we see being given to, e.g., Donald Trump’s throwing his lunch against the wall a year and a half ago.
Why is that?
Because the story is bad news for the Biden administration, whose notoriously lax and understaffed border enforcement has invited more human traffickers to give it a go, betting on the better-than-ever chance that they won’t get caught. As the Wall Street Journal observes in an opinion piece:
The Biden Administration’s failure to enforce border security or to work with Republicans to reform U.S. asylum law encourages ever-more migrants to take their chances on the trek across the border. Border apprehensions are making new records and this fiscal year through May exceed 1.5 million.
Migrants figure that even if they’re caught they have a good chance of remaining in the U.S. The Administration might even fly them on one of its nighttime flights into the interior while they wait for an asylum hearing for which they may never appear. But this human traffic is now dominated by criminal cartels that have few scruples about who lives and who doesn’t.
Donald Trump has been accused, not without reason in my view, of disregarding the requirements of his Office in favor of personal frolics such as using the pardon power to reward buddies like the appalling Roger Stone. But Joe Biden’s snoozing obliviousness to his constitutional oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” is getting people killed. As the Journal continues:
As the party in power in Washington with the responsibility for immigration policy, the Biden Administration has the duty to fix this so migrants don’t have to play roulette with their lives. But as with so many other issues, this White House seems trapped by the demands of the political left to do little or nothing at the border. More human tragedies are inevitable.
The toll this episode has exacted in suffering and death is staggering, but I have to wonder whether, in the long run, the grotesque distortion of the media’s honesty and focus it exposes presents a greater danger to the country.