Jake Tapper doesn't want the words "concentration camp" on TV

And he's winning. But the camps are still growing.

If you don’t ever want to hear the term “concentration camp” on American television describing U.S. policy, you have to give Jake Tapper a lot of credit. He may be more responsible than any single personality for the absence of those words—and the vast meaning and possible understanding that come with them—from your TV.

In the latest episode of Next Comes What, based on one of Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art posts from February, Andrea looks at the two times Tapper has made a point on live TV of expressing his displeasure at the use of the term to describe camps that weren’t involved in the Holocaust, which he thinks hurts survivors of the Shoah and their loved ones.

The first time seemed very intentional. In 2019, he seemingly brought Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on his CNN show to dress her down for her recent use of the term “concentration camp” to describe conditions at the border.

The second time seemed just as unintentional. In January of this year, on the day of the general strike opposing the Trump regime’s siege of the Twin Cities, he cut off a Minneapolis bookseller who had used the term to describe where his neighbors were being sent. “I’m not gonna defend ICE,” Tapper said, “but I’m not a big fan of people using the words ‘concentration camp.’”

Neither AOC nor the bookseller backed down, not on air.

The then-first-term member of Congress from Queens dug into the history for parallels and to summon the disgust for the mass detention of migrants at our border, which Tapper pointed out had begun under Obama.

The bookseller pointed out that Fort Snelling—where his city was sending people—was literally built as a concentration camp. That was his only factual error. It wasn’t built as a concentration camp, but it was used as one during the Dakota War of 1862, according to the Minnesota Historical Society. A miffed Tapper moved on.

What Tapper either doesn’t know or won’t say on air is that America has veered toward concentration camps even before the modern birth of such camps, which Andrea places in Cuba in the 1890s, following the mass production of barbed wire and machine guns. The Cherokee were held in Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama before the Trail of Tears. The Dakota people at Fort Snelling in 1862.

In the era of concentration camps—as all camps of this sort were widely known before the horrors of the Holocaust suggested a “colloquial” uniqueness to the word that Tapper seeks to maintain—America has been home to its own. Some were short-term, like the camps after the Tulsa Race Massacre. Some lasted years, like the mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans from 1942 to 1946. The Zinn Education Project—along with Andrea and other experts cited in the Esquire interview that AOC retweeted in 2019—includes the mass detention of Central Americans at the border from 2014 to today as part of American concentration camp history.

“Our government spent literal centuries rounding up civilians and putting them into concentration camps,” journalist Rebecca Nagle put it. “When contemporary Americans need an example, they look across the ocean.”

AOC has backed off using the term “concentration camps,” even as the Trump regime—with its undeniable ethnic cleansing bent—rushes to build a detention system that could quickly eclipse the scale of Japanese-American internment. ICE is acquiring warehouses in a mad rush to hold children, women, and men: a layout that looks more like a slave ship than any housing for human beings. The fate of that system now hangs in the balance as DHS remains flush with the untold billions passed by Republicans last year—passed alongside Medicaid cuts that JD Vance called “immaterial” by comparison.

They’re trying to build one of these “human warehouses” a couple of dozen miles from my home. There’s a decent chance there’s one planned near you or one of your loved ones.

AOC’s silence on the term may come from the way Tapper pressed her on it in 2019—compelling her, in effect, to explain nearly three decades of congressional inaction on immigration that led presidents of both parties to try to out-deport each other. That’s a heavy burden for one human, no matter how exceptional she is. But this is bigger than all of us now.

This is why words matter. Because so many of our neighbors have no idea how bad this could get. Because our ignorance of history—our need to believe in the exceptionalism of both America and the Holocaust—denies us a truth that Pitzer documents so vividly in One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.

“Concentration camps are a process, one that can be interrupted at the beginning, but less easily further along, and often only at dreadful cost,” she says in this week’s episode.

Building the political will to interrupt that process requires honesty, clarity, and bravery. “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” George Orwell wrote, opposing those who sought to dull the debate on fascism in the 1940s with word play.

Since the birth of modern concentration camps, the next round of camps has always sparked a debate about the term. That debate largely disappeared during World War I, when camps became so prevalent across Europe (and the US) that their existence was simply understood. That normalized history was part of the reason so many were in denial about where the Nazi camp system was heading: they had seen camps before, and those camps had eventually emptied. They had not seen what happened when a camp system, after nearly a decade, appended extermination to its existing infrastructure.

Now consider what’s happening in America today:

If you were swept off the streets in vans by secret police wearing masks; if your initiation into detention involved transit camps meant to hide your departure and effectively disappear you from legal help, temporarily or forever; if you are held with others who are denied due process; and if you are detained with people who have predominantly been rounded up more on the basis of ethnicity, race, religion or political affiliation than for any criminal charge you have in common, you are in a concentration camp.

It is only a question of what stage concentration camp you are in, and whether you will be stuck there until the camp is allowed to transform into its next nightmare form.

I’m going to be more ungenerous than Andrea is of Tapper in her piece. I’m going to argue that if any of Tapper’s loved ones were caught up in this system, or at risk of being caught up in this system, he’d have no problem being clear about what it is. Just look at how hard he went at the whole of the Democratic Party because a single podcaster maligned his son.

As a fellow Jewish man who also grew up in America of the late 20th century—which turns out to be the best time and place in modern history to have ever been a Jew—I know Tapper’s concerns. Survivors of the Shoah were in and out of my synagogue for the whole of my Jewish education, and my first Hebrew School teacher once had to leave class when she attempted to explain the numbers on her arm. I would do anything to avoid adding to that pain, which will always be a pain for the ages.

The Holocaust remains unique, singular. But it is an aberration deeply rooted in history, and that history continues to this day. If we seek to avoid a recurrence of that horror, we must be honest. If we seek only to honor the dead—as Andrea notes—at the expense of the living, then our word play goes beyond denial and clearly into the realm of complicity.