Jeff Sessions makes horrible remark about Jews and Nazi concentration camps
On a day which saw Donald Trump do his best Adolf Hitler impression by insisting that Hispanic immigrants “infest” the United States, his Attorney General Jeff Sessions tried to one-up him. Trump and Sessions are trying to justify why they’ve taken immigrant kids away from their parents and locked them inside cages in concentration camps, and Sessions decided to tackle this by trying to explain why Nazi concentration camps were different.
Jeff Sessions appeared on Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News last night. She tried to throw him one softball question after another, while accusing the critics of the camps of being hyperbolic. Here’s what Sessions said in response, “Well, it’s a real exaggeration, of course. In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country.” Oh my God.
First of all, this is historically inaccurate on a fundamental level; that’s not what was going on with the Nazis and the Jews at all. Second, when you have to start explaining how your own concentration camps are different from the Jewish concentration camps in Nazi Germany, it means you’re truly on the wrong side of history. What stands out here the most is that Sessions could have tried to diffuse this in an entirely different way, but chose not to.
While Donald Trump’s concentration camps are shockingly similar to those of mid-period Hitler, the key differentiation is that Trump’s camps have not evolved into death camps, as Hitler’s camps later did. But instead of pointing this out, Jeff Sessions decided that the only differentiation he wanted to make was that Trump’s camps are aimed at eventually driving Hispanic immigrants out of the United States. Sessions and Trump are no longer even trying to hide what they’re trying to do here.
