Today, CBS News reported that “more than 3,200 migrant children were stuck in CBP facilities,” a number which was “the highest in the agency’s history.”
Soon after the news broke, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez boarded the first available plane to the border and, by early afternoon, could be seen shaking the chain-link fence of the Border Patrol facilities, demanding that they “free the kids from the cages.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a tearful press conference, demanding an end to the practice, saying, “If you start endangering children, I become a lioness.”
CNN featured numerous guests deriding the crisis at the border as “inhumane” and “a stain on our democracy.”
In reality, none of these things happened. At least, not when it was announced that Biden was detaining a record number of migrant children in border control facilities.
Instead, these are all things that happened when it was announced that President Trump was engaging in a similar practice.
This time around, the same Leftist politicians and legacy media outlets are almost entirely silent on an issue they deemed a “once in a generation scandal,” just two years ago.
The same politicians now playing “the quiet game” spent a year competing in a battle of “who can display the most righteous indignation” when President Trump was in office. Their ability to constantly one-up each other in the never-ending quest to denounce Trump in the strongest words possible was, at times, awe-inspiring.
One of the politicians engaging in said competition was the man now engaging in the practice he once claimed to despise: Joe Biden.
For example, in 2019, he tweeted, “We are not a country that detains migrant children indefinitely… we are a country that welcomes those in search of a better life.”
On the contrary, rather than breaking the pattern of detaining children, he’s breaking the record for detaining children.
While campaigning for president in 2020, Biden even made his opposition to the detention of children at the border a core tenant of his immigration policy, saying, “children should be released from ICE detention with their parents immediately.”
However, after winning the election it seems that Biden’s priorities have changed. Maybe the media could ask him about his change of heart, if only he had held one single press conference since taking office, something every President in the last 100 years had done by this point in their first term.
But you won’t see politicians on the Left demanding action. You won’t see your woke friends on Instagram sharing infographics explaining the inherent racism in the practice of detaining children.
Last night, CNN — who spent a year invoking Trump’s detainment of migrant children as evidence of his authoritarian tendencies — opened their primetime shows with passionate discussions regarding the Prince Harry and Meghan Markle feud with the Royal Family.
The Left’s silence on Biden’s border crisis proves that all along, they were more interested in opposing Trump while simultaneously cashing in on the chance to prove to their peers, followers, and friends how woke they are. It’s yet more proof of the solely performative nature of the vast majority of the Left’s outrage.
Remember this indisputable fact the next time you see Democrat politicians and media figures clutching their proverbial pearls, pretending to care about the latest manufactured crisis they’ve chosen to focus on that day.
Now, one question remains.
If President Trump was a “Nazi” for detaining children at the border, what does that make President Biden?
Cabot Phillips is Managing Editor of The Daily Wire’s Readers Pass. Follow him on Twitter at @cabot_phillips.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.