… discriminatory laws, with roundups and deportations, and with internment.

There is a point at which mere fascism becomes something worse. There are plenty of examples of bad actors taking over places. Maybe Trump is an incipient Peron of Franco, maybe not. But the Nazi’s special place in historical Hell is entered when citizens are subject to discriminatory laws, roundups, and deportation or internment. When Trump convenes a Wansee Conference, he will be Hitler. When he sends Latin-American citizens to internment camps, they will be “concentration camps.” Until then, he’s just a run-of-the-mill tin-pot jerk and the detention centers are just an embarrassment.

Words acquire connotations irrevocably. It makes no difference what FDR called the Japanese internment camps. They did not exist as part of a program to exclude Japanese Americans from the country permanently. They were ill-advised, but they were part of a war effort, not ethnic cleansing. Hitler put the designation in bad odor, and you bet that the only reason anyone tries to attach that label to the CBP camps is to attach the connotation. To then fall back on previous usage is dishonest and disrespectful of those to whom the designation actually means something.

Both sides play this game. What AG Barr calls “spying” may technically be so, but in common parlance, spying is something enemies do. If the FBI spies, it is an enemy of someone who has not yet been convicted of a crime. So, any decent human being in charge of the DOJ would refrain from using that word to describe warrant-backed FBI surveillance. AG Barr, of course, is not a decent human being. But neither is someone who fights for the right to call CBP installaions “concentration camps” yet denies that they are trying to invoke images of the Holocaust, images that won’t be ripe for invocation until we have the aforementioned laws, round-ups, deportations, and internments.