Chuck Todd came out and said what far too few Democrats were willing to say yesterday. The detention centers on our southern border are not Nazi concentration camps. In saying this he sidestepped the dodge that AOC and other progressives were using yesterday, pretending that when she spoke of concentration camps she wasn’t referring to Nazi camps. That’s clearly not the case though it was a small minority of Democrats willing to admit as much. Todd started from the position that she meant Nazi camps (she used the phrase “never again” and called Trump a “fascist”) and then pointed out that you can disagree with the detention of migrants without breaking Godwin’s Law.

“If you want to criticize the shameful treatment of people at our southern border, fine. You’ll have plenty of company. But be careful comparing them to Nazi concentration camps because they’re not at all comparable, in the slightest,” Todd said.

Ocasio-Cortez's comparison of ICE detentions to concentration camps did border detainees "a tremendous disservice" #MTPDaily

"She said she didn't use those words lightly," Chuck Todd said. "Well, neither did I." pic.twitter.com/5CIOfWn7BQ

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) June 19, 2019

I’d take issue with the idea that our treatment of people arriving uninvited at the southern border and claiming asylum for which the majority of them aren’t eligible is shameful. I think the Border Patrol is, by its own admission, in crisis mode and dealing with far more people than the system was designed to handle. But some of the blame for the lack of a sufficient response surely belongs on the Democrats who up until a few months ago were still claiming this was a “manufactured crisis.” It’s only recently that progressive outlets like Vox have come around to the idea that the crisis is real.

In any case, Todd was right to also call out Democrats who understood what she was saying but failed to simply say that the two things aren’t alike. He pointed to this tweet by Rep. Jerry Nadler which I also highlighted yesterday.

One of the lessons from the Holocaust is ‘Never Again’ – not only to mass murder, but also to the dehumanization of people, violations of basic rights, and assaults on our common morality. We fail to learn that lesson when we don’t callout such inhumanity right in front of us. https://t.co/EEBBkVL7FG

— Rep. Nadler (@RepJerryNadler) June 18, 2019

The response to Todd’s statement has been to ratio his tweet. It currently has about 1.4k likes but there are 3.7k responses, many from people shaming him for contradicting AOC:

Oh @chucktodd ….this is so bad. Yet another person more upset by @aoc than by the detention camps themselves.

— Dave Zirin (@EdgeofSports) June 19, 2019

For the love of god, Chuck. We’ve had them before.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) June 19, 2019

Chuck, you have to understand, when she says "concentration camp," it's in NO WAY meant to invoke Nazi Germany. It's just a term that's sometimes used, y'know?

This is totally unrelated to everyone being a Nazi, fascist, and bigot. These things aren't interconnected AT ALL. Duh.

— Colin Moriarty (@notaxation) June 20, 2019

https://twitter.com/briansantamaria/status/1141498362132385794

I’m just selecting a few of the blue-checked progressives but there are hundreds more like this, many of them less kind. I wonder how long before there is a pressure campaign to remove Chuck Todd from MSNBC over this.

In a matter of days this “concentration camp” claim has gone from something that almost no one said (certainly not when Obama was in office) to a fact that cannot be denied by anyone on the left. No doubt that will change if a Democrat wins the White House in 2020. In the meantime, they’ll keep pushing this as loudly as they can.