"But what is exhausting about the current debate over the use of the words concentration camp goes beyond Trump and his made-up reality."

"At its heart, the question is: Should we call these camps, where a distinct group of people is being detained by the government, by their proper scholarly name? Or should we avoid it because it invokes* the Holocaust and might somehow diminish from the attendant suffering of those who perished there? Again, the question turns on emotion, on individualized reactions to the specific words, rather than on accuracy and precision; as many have pointed out, the term 'concentration camp' predates the Holocaust and does not require an intention toward genocide.... Are we now spending more time on the labels than on the actual harms? In a time of information overload and outrage fatigue, is fighting over what we call things coming at the cost of fighting against the things themselves? The sometimes threadbare political axiom 'if you’re explaining, you’re losing' comes to mind.... But we must question whether battles over who is most affronted by references to the Holocaust come under the category of explaining, or trying to find shared meanings, or reaching for truth.... What matters is that words still have the capacity to move, inspire, and terrify us. If they can still do that, perhaps they can still push us to act, even if we don’t always agree."

I'm reading "The AOC–Liz Cheney 'Concentration Camp' Fight Might Just Be a Distraction" by Dahlia Lithwick and Susan Matthews (Slate).

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* In an essay about words, it's a good idea to use the right words yourself. It should be evokes, not invokes.