The press and the camps

In the latest podcast episode, I talk about Trump’s refugee policy as whites-only—and how some Democratic elected officials are falling into the same trap when anointing candidates for the November election. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

Today, I’ll share thoughts on a shift in how Americans talk about the catastrophic evolution of incitement and violence against immigrants happening in the U.S. and elsewhere.

I’ve spent the last decade trying to explain just how dangerous purges, roundups, and detention without due process have been right here in the U.S., and the risk that all that will lead to even greater atrocities if we don’t shut it down. But it’s been an uphill battle to get people to realize this country is as susceptible as any other to the underlying dynamic the produces concentration camps.

In fact, one of the things I found while writing my history of camps around the world is that democracies are often as vulnerable as other less-free forms of government when it comes to transforming into a concentration camp society. And my sense is that the utter freedom with which people could write about these matters in the U.S. effectively convinced a lot of editors in particular that it would be hysterical to cover the threat to the American political system and freedom itself as a serious one.

I’ll write about that decade-long journey at greater length eventually, which will in part be an account of how serious people in positions of influence played down the threat and future risks. For now, however, here’s just one example of an attempt I made to raise awareness about the dynamic unfolding in the U.S. during the summer of 2024.

In the wake of Trump’s first administration, I’d been having more success with editors at midsize publications recognizing how dangerous anti-immigrant rhetoric had become. And ahead of the November general election two years ago, an editor at a major U.S. news outlet expressed interested in looking at my pitches and addressing the threat directly.

I sent one that described a failed attempt to trigger widespread pogroms in France in early October 1941, describing how the Nazis had been shocked that the sabotage and violence that they seeded hadn’t led to anything comparable to the horrors that took place in 1938 with Kristallnacht. (I later wrote about it here, for this newsletter.)

I discussed how the difference between France and Germany at the time was not that the French were somehow kinder human beings intrinsically, but instead that the Third Reich had had five years with explicit control over media in which to create omnipresent propaganda to entrench antisemitic hatred more universally, and to generate pressure to act on it.

In the pitch, I compared this to the invented racist fabrications about Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio that had been spread by Trump and his followers, and the associated misinformation wave around immigrants—which I framed as a similar attempt to incite a pogrom. In the piece, I suggested that, for now, the results would be more like France than Nazi Germany, for at least two reasons: because propaganda was not yet the only information available to the public, and because dissent had not yet been crushed. But the threat was evolving, and real.

In her reply, the editor wrote, “I worry a little a little about too quickly conflating the incitement in Springfield (which is real, to be sure) with someone trying to actually spark a pogrom.”

I would have been happy to strengthen or tighten the argument in the actual piece as needed. But the main point of my pitch was that they were in fact trying to spark pogroms—that we had reached that stage with deliberate cultivation of anti-immigrant hatred by a major U.S. party seeking to spark broader violence. The limit on Trump and his allies was that, out of power, they could not yet make it happen.

I won’t use the editor’s name here, for three reasons. Firstly, she herself might or might not have been the editor who actually rejected the pitch; she might have simply been the messenger. Secondly, she’s no longer working at the publication where I pitched my piece to her, and frustration with having to turn down pitches like mine might have played a role in her departure.

And lastly, she wasn’t unique. This was just one of a series of similar encounters with editors over the last several years when I tried to explain how the U.S. was evolving into a traditional concentration camp society. It’s a status the country has previously reached in its history, one that includes repeating forms of violence that occurred in prior eras, from the role of detention in indigenous genocide at the founding of America itself to executions in the Jim Crow era.

One of the key obstacles in fighting the existence of a concentration camp system in any given society is how difficult it is for most institutional powerholders to acknowledge what’s happening in real time. Across more than a hundred years of concentration camps that I studied, this was one of the most common responses—and a damaging one.

We can see how dangerous it is simply by considering places like Camp East Montana in Texas and Delaney Hall in New Jersey. In the case of the United States, the Department of Homeland Security has taken on the role of committing state pogroms itself, purging a vulnerable population through violence and punishment for political gain on a nationwide basis. We are deep into that model now, and it is part of a classic concentration camp template.

In the United Kingdom, the same anti-immigrant sentiment has likewise been stoked year after year by some of the most powerful figures in politics. This week in Belfast, Northern Ireland (which is part of the U.K.), we saw how this incitement works. It’s a mirror for the kind of incident Trump has tried to spark in the U.S. In this case after an individual assault, for which someone was arrested, anti-immigrant social media posts spread like wildfire, calling implicitly and explicitly for a public extrajudicial response.

Earlier this week, Elon Musk—the man who just became a trillionaire today with his IPO of Space X—wrote hateful messages about immigrants and reposting demands that “millions must go.” Violence followed, with mobs setting fire to houses and cars, looking for immigrants to target.

And last week, JD Vance tried to frame a tragic death in the U.K. as an indictment of immigrants as a whole in response to a months-old botched police response to interpersonal violence. He claimed that the death would not have happened “if the last few generations of European elites had ​stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants.”

If we don’t intervene when this kind of hate is cultivated, and address the issue with long term strategies, we’ll see an expanding death toll from the pogroms in Belfast, just as there is already one attached to the concentration camps open in the U.S.

It’s critical to understand where we’re at in this process right now and how much worse things could get. I don’t have much hope that some of the major outlets will change their vocabulary to reflect at this point, but I will continue to reach out. In the meantime, the Jersey Bee, a small nonprofit news outlet serving Essex County, posted a piece by executive editor Simon Galperin on its site yesterday with the headline “Why we’re calling Delaney Hall a ‘concentration camp.’”

In it, Galperin linked to the Marshall Project’s May piece by Katie Moore, “When Do ‘Detention Centers’ Become ‘Concentration Camps’? Experts Look to History.” I talked to Moore back in March for that story, then had a long follow-up conversation with an editor to explain how the historical concentration camp framework fits the U.S. today. I suggested some additional sources as well. They did their homework and found others themselves, too, putting out a piece that I think would help any news organization weighing what language to use going forward.

And it appears by considering that material and other sources that they turned up, The Jersey Bee has formally decided that Delaney Hall corresponds with the definition of a concentration camp. I hope that other outlets will weigh the issue just as seriously, instead of remaining mired in the default position I’ve encountered so much across the last ten years: that it somehow couldn’t happen—cannot be happening—this very moment, right here.

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