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Don Lemon doubled down against President Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric and likened his brand of hate to Hitler’s.
Lemon initiated the conversation after congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took fire on Monday for saying Trump was running “concentration camps” at the US border when talking about the detention centers.
“The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps,” she said.
And for the shrieking Republicans who don’t know the difference: concentration camps are not the same as death camps.
Concentration camps are considered by experts as “the mass detention of civilians without trial.”
And that’s exactly what this administration is doing.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 18, 2019
As Trump fires up his 2020 campaign, the CNN anchor who has been threatened by Trump supporters, told Chris Cuomo his thoughts on whether their news outlets should continue to give “bad people” aka the President and his administration, a platform to “spread lies.”
Lemon then made comparisons between Trump and Adolf Hitler, and asked Cuomo to “think about the most despicable people in history.”
“I’m going to use an extreme example, think about Hitler, think about any of those people,” Lemon said.
“If you could look back at history would you say, ”I’m so glad that that person was allowed a platform to spread their lies and propaganda?” Or would you say that probably wasn’t the right thing to do to spread that because you knew in that moment that that was a bad person and they were doing bad things and not only were they hurting people, they were killing people,” according to The Daily Mail.
Lemon also called out Trump’s refusal to apologize to the exonerated Central Park Five men after who called for them to receive the death penalty for a crime they didn’t commit.
Lemon then backed off a bit saying he wasn’t comparing Trump to Hitler but instead trying to make the point asking if a “bad person’ should be given a platform for hate speech.
—Activists allege racism in treatment of St. Louis prosecutor—
“I’m not comparing him to that, I’m comparing the way you would cover someone who is a bad person who does bad things.
“It starts with little lies, that become bigger lies. Good people follow bad people, it doesn’t mean that you are a bad person, it just means they were used.”
Many on social media are also calling the president for the concentration camps.
I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America. And yes, we are operating such camps again.
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) June 19, 2019
Here’s an idea. Call them fucking concentration camps and stop equivocating or playing devil’s advocate or swimming in semantics to make the villains in this feel better. Literally all they want us to do is argue over terminology.
— Ira thee Third (@ira) June 19, 2019
My Facebook memories are showing me my posts from two years ago, where I was yelling and screaming to get any of my non-activist friends to pay attention to the Nazi rallies about to happen in my home city of Charlottesville. Two years later, we have concentration camps.
— Emily of the State (@EmilyGorcenski) June 19, 2019
Man, some people don’t like when you call their concentration camps concentration camps.
— Ron Marz (@ronmarz) June 19, 2019