It's always a good day in this democratic republic when "concentration camps" is trending on the electric Twitter machine. It's not as grim as the fact that these camps exist, of course, but arguing over the propriety of using the phrase itself in the face of ongoing crimes against humanity is insulting to the children currently living in federally controlled dog runs. Our current episode began when Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got on the electric Instagram machine with this statement of the obvious.

The U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are. 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.

Oh, my. This will not do, said legacy congresswoman and veteran district-shopper Liz Cheney, who decided, as so many who have fallen before, to take on AOC with the assumption that the New Yorker is not as smart as a veteran district-shopper like Liz Cheney. To the electric Twitter machine:

Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.



Besides the fact that Congresswoman Cheney is as truthless as her black-hearted pappy, you may note that AOC said nothing about the Holocaust. She called the concentration camps we're presently running what they are: concentration camps.

AOC stated the simple truth. Liz Cheney spun a lie out of it. Getty Images

Concentration camps did not begin in the 1930s. The British Empire invented them. One of them was called Georgia. Another was called Australia. More precisely, the concentration camps as we know them are a product of the Second Boer War. Historian Eric Rauchway put up a thread on the subject on the electric Twitter machine in which he not only pointed out that the U.S. ran concentration camps, but even called them such. And, finally, AOC herself decided to deliver the clincher, and she did so by linking to a post elsewhere here in the shebeen.



Meanwhile, of course, the president* is threatening to round up "millions" of "illegals" next week, and he kicked off what I am sure will be a dignified and inclusive re-election campaign at the Amway Center in Orlando. Dignity, above all else.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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