Molly Jong-Fast is Worried About Ending Up in ‘The Camps’

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I’m not what you’d call a fan of Molly Jong Fast. She’s basically just another left-wing media person who caters to an audience of people just like her and rarely if ever says anything unexpected or interesting (unlike other left-wing authors I could name who at least try to think outside the box once and do offer some interesting insights).

As a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, Fast recently wrote a piece titled “We All Have a Lot to Lose If Trump Wins.” This special piece from the special correspondent is all of 9 paragraphs long and mostly it’s a kind of fan-fiction about a future dystopia in which Molly Jong Fast winds up in an internment camp.

What would it mean to have a president who, in this fashion, targets what little is left of the free press? It’s hard to fathom, but there’s a world where Trump imitates his strongman friends like Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orbán or Kim Jong Un—all of whom participate in jailing or killing journalists in countries with state-regulated media…

What would internment camps actually entail in the modern day? Well, Trump has talked about deporting up to 20 million undocumented immigrants—an operation of staggering scale that he freely admits will be “bloody.” (The Department of Homeland Security, in 2018, estimated there were 11.4 million undocumented immigrants; Pew put the number at roughly 11 million in 2022.) It’s impossible to imagine what deporting that many people would really look like; maybe blue-state governors would be strong enough to prevent deportation camps from being built in states like California and New York. Maybe the camps would only be in red states, or maybe they’d be erected on federal land, like national parks. Then there’s the question of who would run these camps. Trump, for his part, has mused about using the National Guard…

Trump is telling us all about his potential plans: internment camps, going after his enemies foreign and domestic, including, presumably, journalists. Will I be one of them?

In an interview with Aaron Rupar, she went even further, saying she was destined for Trump’s “concentration camps.”

“He wants to do concentration camps. Where is he going to put these concentration camps?” she said. “Say you have a strong governor. Perhaps that governor says ‘you can’t deport people from my state.’ But then Trump could say, ‘I’m going to put the camps on federal land.’ Those lands don’t belong to the states.” 

“We might not be jailed right away, but we won’t have a country that protects us anymore,” she added later. “We will be people sort of without a state.”

All she needs now is a camp guard with a strong jaw who falls for her despite his MAGA status and her lack of hair products. She’s could have a really bad novel on her hands. It would probably sell a million copies too.

The use of the phrase “concentration camp” is something that was never used to describe deportation efforts or migrant facilities under Obama. Then it briefly became hip to say under Trump. Then it disappeared again under Biden. I guess Fast is just trying to jumpstart the trend again.

How do you dispel this level of paranoia? I’m not sure you can. In fact, it’s hard to believe Fast herself really believes what she’s saying. After all, Donald Trump was president for four years already and neither she nor any other journalist wound up in a “the camps” last time. But she really seems to be trying to convince herself that this time she’s headed straight in on day one.

Trump says some pretty silly stuff when he’s worked up. In 2016 he was going to build the wall and make Mexico pay for it. We all heard that a hundred times. Well, he did build some of the wall but the Mexico paying for it flourish was always just talk. He said it because it sounded tough, not because it was ever going to happen.

Similarly, I don’t think Trump is going to round up 20 million people (or 11 million) and deport them. Liberal courts would shut that down before the ink dried. What he may do is change the rules a bit and get ICE to be more aggressive about rounding up criminal aliens for deportation. That’s already who they are focused on, supposedly, but it may be possible to increase those deportations substantially and perfectly legally.

One thing I don’t think we’ll see is Molly Jong Fast being arrested by ICE. Save that scene for the novel.