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Death Valley National Park Joins Resistance And Starts Tweeting About Japanese-American Internment Camps
The revolution will definitely be tweeted. On Wednesday morning—a day after the official Twitter account for Badlands National Park went rogue and started dropping actual scientific facts—it seems that Death Valley National Park has joined the resistance.
At 7:09 a.m. this morning, the national park's account started talking about World War II-era internment camps:
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They followed that tweet up with a Dorothea Lange photo of influential former Rafu Shimpo newspaper editor Togo Tanaka, who helped chronicle Japanese-American internment. The photo was paired with a quote from Tanaka that ran in a March 13, 1942 Rafu Shimpo editorial.
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We presume the tweets won't last long, so we've included them all as screenshots, as opposed to embedded tweets.
A quick refresher for anyone who hasn't been paying attention: back in November a high-profile surrogate for President Donald Trump actually said that World War II-era Japanese-American internment camps could be seen as a “precedent” for the potential creation of a Muslim immigrant registry. This is despite the, um, slightly awkward fact that the U.S.'s Japanese-American internment camps are pretty much universally considered a black mark on our country's history. In fact, it was no less a conservative icon than Ronald Reagan who signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which issued a formal apology to the more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated, and paid out $20,000 in compensation to all surviving victims.
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