If there’s one thing Republicans know, it’s that when election time comes around, they can always ratchet up the fearmongering propaganda that there’s a border crisis that only the good ol’ GOP can resolve. They’ve been doing it during every election since 9/11. Remember in 2014, it was Ebola, Benghazi, ISIS, Obama and the border. How about 2006, ol’ Dubya and the GOP, trying to distract everyone on the clusterf*ck in Iraq, warned of an unsecured border and sent troops to secure it. They know that their core base of white christian conservatives react strongly to fear and there’s no better fear provoker than a bunch of illegal, brown skinned immigrants approaching the border. Gee, what a coincidence that a caravan of immigrants just happens to be approaching America and will make it to our border right around election time. Hmmm…let’s think like Fox News, a.k.a. the Republican Propaganda Network… maybe the immigrants are nothing more than crisis actors being paid under the table by GOP operatives? Could this be fake news? A great big nothing burger?
This whole spiel is playing more like a Monty Python sketch. I mean the caravan is just inside the Mexico-Guatemala border, still at least 800 miles away from the nearest border in Texas, and almost twice as far to the Arizona border, but the media is covering it like this group was right at the U.S. border. Plus, they’re being portrayed by American CEO/Dictator, Donald Trump, like they’re a band of thugs and criminals and the media is buying into it. He’s even admitted there’s no proof of terrorists being in the throng. So here we are watching the slow motion advance of a band of unarmed, poor, desperate immigrants who are escaping violence in their home countries and meanwhile, our Republican leaders are lining up tanks at the border to mow down these ‘menaces’. There have been more people protesting Trump on any given weekend than there are people in the caravan and yet this band of walking immigrants is getting more coverage (especially Fox News) than any group of protesters. But the media keeps brainlessly repeating Trump’s narrative that there doesn’t seem to be a way to stop these marauding foreigners from making a run on our borders.
Which brings us to the racist fearmongering ads being run across the board by Republicans in Arizona. They are attacking all Democratic candidates as being weak on immigration and insinuating that candidates like gubernatorial candidate David Garcia, who are against building a wall, (like most Americans), would welcome with open arms illegal gun toting, drug taking immigrants. We’ve posted here before that illegal immigration has been dropping in recent years and since Trump has taken office, it’s down even more. A border wall is completely unnecessary. Not only that, it wouldn’t stop drugs from getting over the border. The cartels would just build more tunnels and find new routes for their drones and planes. A border wall would be a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money. Candidates like Garcia and Kyrsten Sinema want a common sense approach to securing the border and eliminating drug dealers. But leave it to the Republicans like Governor Doug Ducey (pronounced douchey), to push fearmongering border politics to try and win an election.