Yes, Jake, The U.S. Is Building Concentration Camps (#117)
Jake Tapper was wrong to criticize a Minneapolis business owner for explaining how the Trump regime is using concentration camps, how Democrats could legitimize Trump by being a loyal opposition during the State of the Union, a new poll highlights the president’s unpopularity, the Heritage Foundation outlines its plans to strip women of most of their rights, and why we must not let Trump force us not to celebrate the best about the USA.
Here we go. I’m glad you’re here.
“It might be helpful for you to know that you are not alone. And that in the long, twilight struggle which lies ahead of us, there is the possibility of hope.” “The Long Twilight Struggle.” Babylon 5, created and written by J. Michael Straczynski, Season 2, Episode 20, 1995.
#1
- What counts as a “concentration camp”? (Andrea Pitzer, Degenerate Art, Link to Article)
Andrea Pitzer is the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. It is one of the best—and most troubling—history books I read last year. The Trump regime’s mass deportation atrocities made this history all too relevant to our present.
Last month, CNN anchor Jake Tapper took offense when Jamie Schwesnedl, the co-owner of the Minneapolis bookstore Moon Palace Books, correctly referred to the Trump regime establishing concentration camps as part of its mass deportation atrocity.
Pitzer explains the historical context:
Rooted in the undeniable uniqueness of the Holocaust, Tapper’s view isn’t uncommon in the Jewish community, or even outside it. But as I know from my own work, the bookseller’s view is also very much held by many Jewish and non-Jewish Americans. Rabbis, Jewish studies programs, Holocaust memorial educational foundations, and Holocaust museums alike have brought me in to talk about concentration camp history and how it fits in with what is happening in the United States now.
In these discussions, I often begin by tracing the half-century between the earliest modern concentration camps and the extermination camp at Auschwitz, to try to help people understand how humanity descended to such atrocities after the invention of barbed wire and automatic weapons. And I hope my words are useful. But many times they’re hardly necessary for others to recognize events in the U.S. today as repeating grim history.
Okay. So there are reasons why Tapper believes that the phrase “concentration camps” can refer only to the death camps established by the Nazis. Tapper is visibly offended during this interview, waving his hand dismissively to move on when Schwesnedl wouldn’t just accept his anchorly wisdom. But as a television news anchor, Tapper has a greater responsibility to acknowledge the history of concentration camps that extends into the 1890s. As Pitzer explains:
In such a fraught moment, with detention camps already in existence and with planned warehouse-style expansions, I think looking at this question through a historic lens is useful. This question of whether or not it’s moral or appropriate to use the term “concentration camp” has been asked and answered again and again, long before the Nazis ever seized power.
In fact, the question was asked from almost the first moment it was possible to compare one set of such camps to the next. The first, rough model of modern concentration camps took place under the policy of reconcentración in Cuba in the 1890s. Just a few years later, during the Second Boer War in South Africa, several newspapers compared the new British system of camps there to the prior Spanish model. Many newspapers recognized the similarities between the camps holding Boers and the Cuban camps for reconcentrados—and in some cases, approved of the them. Others denied the new camps were concentration camps at all, echoing today’s arguments.
In London, politicians like David Lloyd George denounced Parliament for refusing to call them concentration camps or to acknowledge what the country was doing. “There is no greater delusion in the mind of any man,” he said, “than to apply the term ‘refugee’ to these camps. They are not refugee camps. They are camps of concentration.”
That is why this is an important point not to concede to Tapper’s desire to simplify the history. Hitler didn’t go from zero to the Final Solution immediately. It took time, nearly a decade. We know from previous concentration camp regimes that the time to stop them is early on in the process, before they begin to be seen as a normal part of life.
When Jake Tapper says that other camps may qualify as concentration camps on a technical, academic level, but that when most Americans hear the term, they think only about death camps, he’s not wrong about the general public’s perception. But if he accepts the public ignorance, it puts him at odds with his job as a journalist, which is not to coddle ignorance. And it puts him in a bind that I’ve never seen him acknowledge—one that’s difficult to finesse.
The sheer magnitude of death at Auschwitz—where some 1.1 million humans, approximately a million of them Jewish detainees, were murdered—reset humanity’s notion of what a concentration camp was. It took many years before the extent of the horror that had happened there was clearly laid out. But once the knowledge became widespread, the site was rightly recognized as a revolution in depravity when it came to concentration camps.
The staggering toll of the Holocaust established it as a singular event, and in the decades that followed, nothing else seemed to qualify in the public’s mind as a concentration camp. The four decades of camps that had preceded Auschwitz were forgotten by many Americans.
Of course historians remembered; reality didn’t vanish. But with the general failure to remember that Auschwitz was literally part of the Nazi concentration camp system before the extermination camp at Birkenau was ever built, people lost sight of how such evil found its way into the world.
Those early Nazi camps made the extermination camps possible. They existed for years, as the cruelties inside them expanded, providing the bureaucratic systems, personnel, and tactics that led to the Holocaust. And those pre-death-camp German camps were in many respects very similar to other concentration camp systems that have existed around the world on several continents.
And this is why we must accurately describe what the Trump regime is doing. They are building concentration camps. The Department of Homeland Security is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy literal warehouses to house people who fall into the state of exception it has created.
We must not wait for death camps before we describe what is happening in our country. We should be appalled that concentration camps exist once again in the United States. I hope those feelings create activism for change rather than dismissive waves of a hand.
#2
- The State of the Union Choice: Restoration or Resistance? (Tad Stoermer, Link to Article)
Tonight, the Democrats will respond to Trump’s State of the Union. A few of the hundreds of Democrats in Congress are staging a protest. But the vast majority will probably be there, in the House chamber, performing business as usual — norms intact, institutions functioning, comity on display.
The Democrats’ chosen opposition voice for this moment is Abigail Spanberger, the governor of Virginia. And she’s going to respond from Colonial Williamsburg.
The Democrats had a choice. And that choice speaks volumes about their resistance.
…
There are obvious reasons the Democrats chose Spanberger, in this 250th year of American celebration. As the first female governor of Virginia, placing her at Colonial Williamsburg makes a legible symbolic argument: the patriotic story still works, the moral arc still bends, the institutions still produce progress if you give them room to breathe. And then there’s the electoral calculation: all that really matters isn’t direction opposition, but indirect reclaimation of the tools of power: the Democratic Party’s chances in November. And their bet is that Spanberger — centrist, credentialed, safe — is the future that returns America to the past. A former CIA officer who can hold purple voters with a message about affordability without threatening anything structural.
That would make the second consecutive year Democrats have chosen a white, centrist former intelligence officer to deliver this message. Slotkin last year, Spanberger tonight.
Both calculations are the same calculation. The symbol and the strategy are doing identical work. The arc bends, and the people it bends toward are white, establishment, safe. This is what loyal oppositions do. Not necessarily out of cowardice or confusion — out of function. The resistance gets managed so the order doesn't have to change.
Jason Stanley has mapped the authoritarian playbook with precision. What his framework doesn't account for is that loyal opposition — how liberal nationalism runs its own operation on the other side, chilling the resistance that authoritarians most need to fear.
And the setting is already doing real work before a word is uttered on Tuesday night.
Governor Spanberger may do a good job speaking tonight in what is one of the most difficult situations a politician can face.
But, as Stoermer explains, there were other possible choices who would have more readily transmitted the message that the Democratic Party understands this is a crisis and change is necessary.
Instead, we see the Democratic Party leadership once again responding with a message that doesn’t match its emergency-level fundraising appeals. I fear that trying to share false comfort from a fictionalized version of the Founding generation is not going to inspire people to resist the Trump regime.
Why not have the speech in Minneapolis? Or outside one of the warehouses the Department of Homeland Security has purchased to increase its concentration camp network?
Democrats treating this State of the Union message as normal lends legitimacy to the Trump regime and its actions. We do not need a loyal opposition right now.
We need a resistance. We need Democratic political actions to match their rhetoric.
Spanberger has done a great job in her opening weeks as Virginia’s governor. I hope she can exceed the setting to lay out to the American people what is at stake.
You can also watch an extended version of Stoermer’s essay on YouTube.
#3
- Ahead of State of the Union, Trump's approval falls to new low of 37% (G. Elliott Morris, Strength in Numbers, Link to Article)
Tonight, Donald Trump will deliver the first formal State of the Union address of his second term to a joint session of Congress. The speech is widely seen as a test run for Republican midterm messaging — an attempt to reframe the narrative on the economy, immigration, and tariffs ahead of November. In an interview last week, Vice President JD Vance previewed the speech, saying Trump would focus on his success in “bringing jobs back into our country,” “reshoring manufacturing,” and cutting energy prices.
But the numbers Trump faces going into his speech are brutal. Our brand-new February Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll finds the president at his lowest point on virtually every metric. Trump’s overall job approval has fallen to net -22, and he’s now underwater or tied on every single issue we track, including border security, which had been his last remaining bright spot. Democrats have opened a 10-point lead on the generic congressional ballot, the widest we’ve recorded. And voters disapprove of Trump’s tariff policy — presumably his focus, according to Vance, and which was largely invalidated by the Supreme Court last week — by 21 points.
Trump will use his SOTU address to refocus attention on all the “great things” he has done for the American people in his first year in office. But the average person is saying they don’t support his agenda. The State of our Union, in one term, is anti-Trump.
The Trump regime has done so much to earn these horrible poll numbers.
A normal president would try to change the dynamics by announcing new policies, changing unpopular ones, and finding a scapegoat or three to take the hit on his behalf.
But Trump is not a normal president. He’s an authoritarian, one who is annoyed that people seem to think he should care about the opinion of anyone not a MAGA supporter.
Trump could take advantage of the public’s focus on the State of the Union with a speech focused on policy changes and how he will do better in year two of his second term than in his first.
But that is not who Trump is. He doesn’t like reading off teleprompters. He loves going off script. But that tendency does not make for an effective State of the Union presentation.
This new poll is awful news for an incumbent president. I do wonder if Republican leaders’ fear of losing their seats will soon overcome their fear of angering the Dear Leader, who demands fealty to unpopular policies.
Ah, how naive of me. We have been waiting a decade for that dynamic to appear. There is little reason to suggest that Republicans will start seeking to leave the Trump regime cult any time soon.
#4
- They’re Coming for Our Daughters (Jessica Valenti, Abortion Every Day, Link to Article)
A few weeks ago, the Heritage Foundation—the powerhouse organization behind Project 2025—released a 250-year roadmap to “save America.” Written by authors with close ties to the Trump administration, the document is a how-to guide for subjugating girls and young women: a detailed plan to push them out of college, funnel them into early marriage and motherhood, and then trap them there.
The document is part of a broad, well-funded campaign to reassert misogynist control by targeting women while they’re young and pliable—and chip away at one of Democrats’ most supportive demographics in the process.
According to Heritage, the future of the country relies on more straight married couples having more children. To make that happen, the group says, the government has to address multiple factors that “conspire” to drive down birth rates: “These include the proliferation of birth control, more prospects for women to receive higher education and work outside the home…”
In other words, pretty much every major advancement for women’s rights and freedom is a problem. And whether it’s eradicating “cheap and ubiquitous” access to contraception or appointing family court judges hostile to divorce, Heritage has the answer.
Valenti is right to raise this alarm about what the Heritage Foundation, and its MAGA supporters, want for girls and young women.
The MAGA/white religious nationalist solutions for raising the (white) birth rate all happen to coincide with their wish list to strip women of their rights. This isn’t just about women’s right to choose the best reproductive healthcare or to use contraception, but the discussions also include whether women should continue to stay in the workforce and how to overturn the 19th Amendment.
Can women seek to fulfill their dreams in freedom—or will they be forced to get married early, have as many babies as possible, and submit to their husbands as the white religious nationalists wrongly believe the Bible demands?
We are fortunate that the Heritage Foundation has once again written out its plan in stark detail. We are also fortunate that we still have the ability to defeat this effort to turn the United States into a real-life Gilead.
#5
- The Olympics, Finale: Team USA’s Best Winter Games Ever (Rodger Sherman, Sports!, Link to Article)
The Winter Olympics have concluded, and the United States enjoyed its best overall performance.
But as the start of these games was diminished by the appearance of Vice President JD Vance (although the booing was fun, even if NBC didn’t choose to share that part), the conclusion to the games was soiled by a sexist comment by President Trump, one cheered on by the gold-medal-winning United States Men’s Ice Hockey Team.
Rodger Sherman does an outstanding job of explaining what happened, but why we should still care about what these athletes accomplished.
Team USA’s great Olympics became less fun in the last 24 hours. For the first two weeks of the games, American athletes won gold after gold with little to no recognition from the Trump administration. (They did, of course, take time to trash American athletes who weren’t deferential enough.)
But then, the administration got REALLY excited about the men’s hockey win over Canada: FBI director Kash Patel flew to Italy, got into the locker room after the game, and drank beers with the players. Donald Trump called the team after the game and invited them to the White House, adding a joke about how “he’d be impeached” unless he invited the women’s team as well. Then Trump went online and reposted AI-generated videos of himself punching Canadian hockey players in the face.
Throughout these Olympics, people asked me why I was cheering for Team USA at this bleak moment in American history. I get it! Our government is a nightmare, causing endless harm internationally and at home. Abroad, they’re picking needless fights with our closest allies — remember what I said about Donald Trump reposting AI-generated videos of himself punching imaginary Canadians in the face? And domestically, they’re building camps for immigrants, and sending masked goons to brutalize and occasionally murder our neighbors in our streets.
So yeah. It felt weird being patriotic during these Olympics. Many Team USA athletes said so themselves.
But America is so much bigger than Donald Trump and his evil government.
The flag that flies when an American athlete wins a gold medal isn’t Donald Trump’s flag. It’s ours. The anthem that plays isn’t Donald Trump’s song. It’s ours. If we refuse to celebrate what’s great about our country because of the people trying to ruin it, they’ve already succeeded.
There’s a reason Trump and his administration didn’t celebrate most of Team USA’s wins. (Except the men’s hockey team. I wonder why...) The bigots in charge of our country like to claim that our diversity makes us weaker. Every two years, Team USA proves otherwise at the Olympics. Americans of every race, every background, and every orientation show that they can work together to become the best in the world.
This year’s Team USA featured all sorts of Americans this administration hates. While this administration tries to demonize immigrants and forcibly remove them from our country, nearly one-fifth of Team USA were immigrants or the children of immigrants, like naturalized citizen Kaillie Humphries and first-generation American Alysa Liu. While this administration cracks down on LGBTQ+ rights, Team USA had Hilary Knight getting engaged to Brittany Bowe before winning a gold medal. While this administration tries to reimagine America as a white ethnostate, Team USA had Black gold medalists like Elana Meyers Taylor and Laila Edwards.
Watching Team USA have their best Winter Olympics ever was a much-needer reminder of all the reasons we can’t give up on this whole America thing. The Trump administration is the worst of us. Team USA is the best of us. Why on earth would we let the worst thing about our country dampen our love for the best things about our country?
Oh, that last line is so damn important. “Why on earth would we let the worst thing about our country dampen our love for the best things about our country?”
Liberals allowed Republicans to steal patriotic symbolism in the 1980s. That was a mistake. Let’s not make it again. There is nothing more patriotic than the immigrants and LGBTQ athletes who represented the United States at these games.
Trump and Vance and their minions don’t get to take that from us.
Follow me on BlueSky to see the stories I’m finding and the tabs I’m opening in real-time.
On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump instigated a violent insurrection against the United States government. Here’s a video from the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol that one can review if their memory fades.
People were hurt and police officers died protecting the Capitol. Vice President Pence and other elected officials just barely escaped danger. Our national streak of peaceful transfers of power ended.
It was not, as Trump claims, a “day of love.” And we must resist his efforts to rewrite the history of that dark day.
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