Earlier this year, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) announced that he was responding to Texas' Gov. Greg Abbott's (R) request for help at the southern border, sending 100 National Guardsmen as a result. Months later, and just weeks before the November statewide elections, the biased media at both the local and national level is looking to downplay the border crisis and Youngkin's compliance with the request. Since Monday, there have been no less than three articles about the Virginia National Guard's trip to the border.
"Virginia National Guard finds no fentanyl, refers 86 migrants a day during $2 million trip to Texas border," read Monday's headline from NBC 4, discussing the News4 I-Team findings that reviewed roughly three weeks' worth of daily summaries.
Whether 100 guardsmen from one state find any fentanyl hardly speaks to the crisis overall, or that fentanyl overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18-45. Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, more than 23 tons of fentanyl have crossed the southern border, which is enough to kill roughly 10.5 billion people. None of those statistics are mentioned in the piece, though.
Youngkin's statement in the May 31 executive order mentioned fentanyl, but that was not the only focus of his statement.
"The ongoing border crisis facing our nation has turned every state into a border state," he said. "As leadership solutions at the federal level fall short, states are answering the call to secure our southern border, reduce the flow of fentanyl, combat human trafficking and address the humanitarian crisis. Following a briefing from Governor Abbott last week, Virginia is joining other states to deliver on his request for additional assistance. Given the intensive resource demands on Texas, the dangers posed by the fentanyl crisis, and impact of the border crisis on criminal activity to the Commonwealth, Virginia will do its part to assist the State of Texas’ efforts with the coordinated deployment of Virginia National Guard soldiers to assist in key aspects of their mission."
It is not until the closing of the article that the NBC 4 piece mentions the governor's perspective on how the mission went, as well as the commander of the Virginia National Guard task force:
Asked about the I-Team’s findings earlier this month, Youngkin defended the mission as “without a doubt” worthwhile.
“We need to secure our border,” Youngkin told the I-Team, adding the troops did so by helping “thousands and thousands and thousands of other guardsmen who were working on the border in Texas.”
At the conclusion of the 30-day deployment, the commander of the Virginia National Guard task force also declared the mission “highly effective.”
Then came a a piece for MSNBC's "Maddow Blog" by Steve Benen, who wrote that "Glenn Youngkin’s border initiative faces unflattering scrutiny," his subheadline claiming that "Gov. Glenn Youngkin deployed Guard troops to the border in order to address 'the fentanyl crisis.' They did not, however, actually find any fentanyl," with the very real crisis put in what appears to be scare quotes.
Right from the start, Benen's bias appears to be right on display, while he brings up how it's a matter of politics in the opening and closing of his piece:
In contemporary Republican politics, there’s an expectation that ambitious GOP officials will spend a fair amount of time at the U.S./Mexico border. But especially ambitious Republican governors go further, deploying National Guard troops to the border, which in turn makes it easier to boast to partisan audiences about their efforts.
It was against this backdrop that Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced in the spring that he was deploying troops to Texas. The Virginia Republican — who’s taken a variety of steps to raise his public profile outside of the commonwealth — faced immediate pushback from critics who said he was using the Guard for political purposes, but the governor insisted that the mission had merit.
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If recent history is any guide, Youngkin is likely to brag about all of this anyway the next time he speaks to a partisan audience, but those who care about consequences should keep these details in mind.
Benen mentions the NBC 4 report, but he too fails to mention the statistics above about the dangers of fentanyl.
What followed was a Tuesday report from The Washington Post's Philip Bump, with his headline of "Glenn Youngkin and the gap between fentanyl politics and reality."
Just as the headline suggests, the piece is about partisan politics, beginning with discussion about the 2024 presidential election, despite acknowledging Youngkin "is not a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination."
In referencing the NBC 4 report, and reporting from NPR, Bump points to how fentanyl is seized at checkpoints. He once more gets into politics towards the conclusion of his piece, though.
"This is the central challenge of border politics. Fentanyl trafficking and the deaths that ensue is a severe problem in the United States but one that lacks obvious solutions. It’s rhetorically easy to portray illegal border crossings as a conduit for other illegal activity, like drug smuggling, but that rhetoric isn’t sustainable in practice," he claims.
There's also no mention in any of the reports of how Virginia has been directly affected by fentanyl, with the governor noting that fentanyl "has devastated families and communities across Virginia." On average, five Virginians will die each day, Secretary of Health and Human Resources John E. Littel shared in that same early May press released.
Further, there's no mention of the success of Operation Lone Star overall, which the Virginia National Guard participated in. As a result, there were over 473,900 illegal immigrant apprehensions, more than 34,800 criminal arrests, with more than 31,800 felony charges reported and has seized over 431 million lethal doses of fentanyl during this border mission.
The bigger picture of the failures of the Biden administration on this issue is not a pretty one. This includes high amounts of illegal drugs sized, including but not only fentanyl, but methamphetamine as well. In fact, in August alone, 1,773 pounds of fentanyl and 11,505 pounds of meth were seized at the border, with more no doubt getting through.
Record high border crossings have also taken place, with the number at 7.5 million illegal immigrants total sine Biden took office. This includes 232, 972 immigrants encountered attempting to cross the border in August, which was a 27 percent increase from July, and the highest for August in DHS history.
The response from the White House, from Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, to Biden himself, has largely been to lie and gaslight about the situation, though.
According to RealClearPolitics, Biden currently has just a 33 percent approval rating on immigration, while 63.8 percent disapprove.