A taste from Gupta:
It’s interesting, because when we launched the campaign, the Institute for Public Accuracy, which tries to get non-mainstream voices into the mainstream, they sent out a press release about this effort, and I pretty much immediately was contacted by NPR’s reporter for the borderlands and immigration, John Burnett. And it was a bizarre and disturbing exchange, because, essentially, he was trying to set a trap for me. He doesn’t even say, like, “Oh, I’m interested in this story. What is this about blah, blah, blah.” He just starts immediately, “Which of the facilities are concentration camps?”
And we start having an exchange, where I’m like, “I’m not going to be drawn into this game.”
And finally he admits, “Well, I’m touring the new HHS child influx center in Carrizo Springs tomorrow; so I wanted to know, like, which one of these specific shelters are concentration camps.”
And I’m like, “You were basically playing a gotcha game; you wanted me to say, like, ‘They’re all concentration camps,’ then you’re going to go on this Trump administration-run tour, and talk about how great it is.”
And in fact, that is exactly what he did in his report, but he couldn’t attribute it to anyone. He starts out by saying, you know, “Critics called these child prisons and concentration camps. But this is definitely not one of them,” or something like that; people can go listen to the report.
And then I asked him, “What do you think are concentration camps?” And he basically says, “That’s an unknowable question. And this is a controversial topic.” This is how we get euphemisms in the mainstream, where torture becomes “enhanced interrogation,” or war crimes against civilians become “collateral damage.”
Basically, anyone who is an expert in this field has said, “These are concentration camps. They meet the historical definition.”
No one is calling them “death camps.” But in 1933, the death camps were concentration camps, and there’s all the historical examples, from Spain and Cuba, Germany and Namibia, British in South Africa. This is how they began. This is basically similar. The US has its own experience with concentration camps: reservations for Native Americans in the 19th century that were places of disease, death and brutality, to the strategic hamlets in Vietnam, which were essentially concentration camps. And so now we’re seeing this on the borders again.
But what we have is a media that is both overly legalistic, where you can’t say anything unless it arises to a judicial level of proof.
That, my friends, is your fucking "Liberal-Media Resistance™" Thank god for Masha Gessen, at least.