Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is doubling down on her claim made in an Instagram livestream last night that President Trump has “established concentration camps on the southern border,” saying it’s not “hyperbole” because it’s the “conclusion of expert analysis”:
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.
This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis ⬇️https://t.co/2dWHxb7UuL
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 18, 2019
You see, “concentration camps” don’t have to be “Dachau or Auschwitz”:
“What’s required is a little bit of demystification of it,” says Waitman Wade Beorn, a Holocaust and genocide studies historian and a lecturer at the University of Virginia. “Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz. Concentration camps in general have always been designed—at the most basic level—to separate one group of people from another group. Usually, because the majority group, or the creators of the camp, deem the people they’re putting in it to be dangerous or undesirable in some way.”
Now, here’s where it gets funny. According to AOC’s definition of a concentration camp, these were camps and tactics “pioneered by” President Barack Obama. From the same article she cited above:
History is banging down the door this week with the news the Trump administration will use Fort Sill, an Oklahoma military base that was used to detain Japanese-Americans during World War II, to house 1,400 unaccompanied migrant children captured at the border. Japanese internment certainly constituted a concentration-camp system, and the echoes of the past are growing louder. Of course, the Obama administration temporarily housed migrants at military bases, including Fort Sill, for four months in 2014, built many of the newer facilities to house migrants, and pioneered some of the tactics the Trump administration is now using to try to manage the situation at the border.
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Oh, and Bill Clinton ran “concentration camps,” too:
But by Pitzer’s measure, the system at the southern border first set up by the Bill Clinton administration, built on by Barack Obama’s government, and brought into extreme and perilous new territory by Donald Trump and his allies does qualify. Two historians who specialize in the area largely agree.
Over to you, AOC. Where’s the outrage at Dems?
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Related:
Absolutely DISGUSTING! AOC accusing Trump of running concentration camps SO vile we’re not sure where to begin (watch) https://t.co/2kb6YNEICD
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) June 18, 2019
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