It’s been at least six days since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said something inflammatory and ignorant, so we knew we had to be due for another bombshell display of idiocy any moment. Our anticipation was rewarded on Tuesday when the New York congresswoman accused the Trump administration of housing illegal immigrants in “concentration camps” at the border, drawing scorn and disgust from Jewish groups, Republicans, and even a handful of her Democratic colleagues.
“This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying,” tweeted Ocasio-Cortez. “This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis.”
To prove this last claim, AOC quoted from a recent article in Esquire, which has turned itself into Resistance Central since Trump’s election.
“Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz,” historian Waitman Wade Beorn told the magazine.
We don’t doubt that’s true, but there is literally no reason to use that terminology unless you are trying to establish a link between Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jews and the Trump administration’s treatment of illegal immigrants. And on her Instagram video feed, AOC made it clear that was exactly what she was trying to do.
“I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘Never Again’ means something,” she said. “The fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing and we need to do something about it.”
Saying we were currently living under “an authoritarian and fascist presidency,” Ocasio-Cortez insisted: “I don’t use those words lightly. I don’t use those words to just throw bombs. I use that word because that is what an administration that creates concentration camps is. A presidency that creates concentration camps is fascist.”
Many accused Ocasio-Cortez of demeaning the importance of the Holocaust with her reckless remarks.
“Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history,” tweeted Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY). “6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”
While it is superficially true that the Trump administration is detaining asylum-seekers in “camps,” the differences between our current migrant detention centers and the concentration camps of World War II are far more stark than their similarities. For one thing, not one migrant has been marched into a gas chamber. That’s a pretty significant difference all on its own. For another, these migrants are free to leave whenever they want. All they need to do is…go back home. We don’t remember Jews being given that option during the Holocaust.
Comparing Trump with Hitler has become one of the left’s most tiresome memes, and AOC’s adoption of this nonsense only proves she lacks the brains God gave a goat. We’d say she should be ashamed of herself, but we’re pretty sure she’s impervious to that emotion.
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