What counts as a "concentration camp"? Well worth a read. [View all]

https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/what-counts-as-a-concentration-camp

What counts as a "concentration camp"?
Links to the podcast, along with some thoughts on and for Jake Tapper.
Degenerate Art
Andrea Pitzer
February 13, 2026

In this week’s podcast episode, I talk about ICE’s plan to double immigrant detention in the U.S. by acquiring warehouses and turning them into camps, how that accelerates the current concentration camp system, and ways to disrupt that plan. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the linked material or the written post from Tuesday, you can read it here.
(A YouTube screenshot of Jake Tapper interviewing the Moon Palace bookstore owner in Minneapolis on CNN.)

Today, I want to write about people’s frequent discomfort around using the words “concentration camp." Avoiding the term often rises out of an honorable impulse yet can have terrible consequences. I hope to come at the question from a different angle than the usual conversations, which sometimes fail to explore the issue in a deeper way.

Why look at this issue now? Yesterday, I saw a video from January, in which a bookstore owner in Minneapolis was interviewed by Jake Tapper on CNN. Asked about the planned walkouts and shutdowns that day, the bookstore owner dove right into the crisis.

“Well Jake, we can’t do business as usual right now anyway,” he says, “because our city has been invaded by masked gunmen kidnapping family members and friends and neighbors of ours, uh, to send them to concentration camps.” The bookstore owner talks about other businesses whose staff or customers are afraid to be out on the street.

Then Tapper jumps in. “Just one note. I’m not going, I’m not gonna defend ICE,” he says, “but, I’m, I’m not a big fan of people using the words ‘concentration camp’ to, to describe detention camps. It has a very specific meaning in terms of—.”

The bookstore owner doesn’t wait for him to finish, but interrupts:
Much more at link and well worth a read