MSNBC Liberal Plays the Godwin Card: Godwin Unimpressed.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes told his readers that calling Trump’s concentration camps what they are is a violation of Godwin’s Law. Then Godwin weighed in.

Chris Hayes is one of MSNBC’s super-stars. With his quirky smile and goofy horn-rimmed glasses, you can always count on Hayes to get to the heart of any story, delivering expert analysis and exposing the truth no matter how difficult the topic. He is a self-identified progressive.

So you can imagine how well it went went when Hayes implored his followers on Twitter to stop referring to President Donald Trump’s migrant concentration camps as… well, concentration camps. Worse, he invoked Godwin.

This did not go so well, and Hayes was at least man enough to admit that he expected to be bashed for his statement. What he likely didn’t expect was that Mike Godwin himself would weigh in and tell him to stop playing games.

Godwin’s response goes to show that Hayes, as well-intentioned as he may be, is massaging the English language. He is going out of his way to make a terrible thing seem less bad than it actually is. George Carlin spoke profanely and eloquently about using words to “hide reality,” saying “Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of soft language to protect themselves from it.”

Chris Hayes —journalist and progressive— should know better.

Author: Brendan Skwire

Brendan Skwire is a cultural and media critic. He offers nearly two decades of experience as a journalist, video editor, blogger, and community organizer. Skwire has worked for the Philadelphia Weekly, Scrapple TV, and Raw Story, and is a former member of the News Guild.

8 thoughts on “MSNBC Liberal Plays the Godwin Card: Godwin Unimpressed.”

  1. Social media turns Woody Allen’s scene in Annie Hall into a daily reality, ha-ha. Watch carefully whose views you claim to know precisely…

    Calling Trumper’s ethnic cleansing camps “death camps” (like Treblinka, for example) would be going too far–at least so far as we know. (And Sebastian Gorka’s wife isn’t going to be explaining them to the press!) But “concentration camps” is perfectly fine, as Hitler’s first camps were long term detention centers for his political opponents–something that Der Trumper would be delighted to replicate in TrumpAmerica and something on which he has probably asked for a DOJ opinion!

    1. Also, too, the bigger difficulty is that The 46% is delighted to have them billed as “concentration camps”–that’s why they voted for Der Trumper, and why they can’t wait to vote for him again. His “accomplishments” in ethnic cleansing and Latino harassment will be his chief re-election issue, that’s already quite clear.

    2. Thanks for your comment. It’s not just that

      “concentration camps” is perfectly fine, as Hitler’s first camps were long term detention centers for his political opponents

      ; it’s that “concentration camps” are a common feature over the past century of governmental oppression—with everyone from Roosevelt’s USA (Japanese-American internment) to Lord Cecil’s (2nd Boer War) & Churchill’s (Kenya) Great Britain to Argentina (Dirty War) to France (Algeria) to North Korea to Russia/USSR to Yugoslavia (Nazi & Communist) adopting the practice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_internment_camps

      It’s common. It’s evil. It’s illegal. Let’s call it what it is.

  3. Wikipedia

    The American Heritage Dictionary defines the term concentration camp as: “A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable.”

  4. Brendan you’re gonna need an update with Chuck Todd’s chastising Congresswoman AOC. It was so much worse. And happened on TV!

  5. I think the 2nd quote is supposed to say, “Chris, I think they’re concentration camps. Keep in mind that one of their functions *by design* is to punish those individuals and families who are detained. So even the “charged” term is appropriate.” – Mike Godwin.

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