A Republican candidate for Virginia’s state legislature removed a meme from his personal Facebook page that mocked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) comparison of U.S. migrant detention facilities to concentration camps.
Paul Milde, running to be a delegate from the state’s 28th district, which consists of Fredericksburg—between Washington, D.C., and the state capital of Richmond—shared a meme on Saturday. It depicted a photoshopped picture of living room with an enclosed play pen with a child in it and a mother on the outside as a picture of Ocasio-Cortez looms on a TV in the background. The description: “Install your very own concentration camp … In the comfort of your own home!”
“Too much! Lol,” commented Milde in sharing the image by a Facebook user named “Jerry F Fitzgerald.”
“GOP VA House candidate Paul Milde has both made light of the horrors at our border & demeaned the millions killed in concentration camps in the Holocaust. This type of “joking” cannot be tolerated. Milde should apologize for the inexcusable post he shared,” tweeted Virginia House of Delegates minority leader Eileen Filler-Corn, a Democrat.
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Despite deleting his sharing of the meme, Milde justified posting it in the first place.
“Having visited Buchenwald and Dachau in Germany, and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, I learned what constitutes an actual concentration camp and the unimaginable horrors that took place there,” he toldJewish Telegraphic Agency. “That is why I was profoundly offended when Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez casually compared America’s handling of an immigration crisis she previously claimed did not exist to the Nazis’ crimes against humanity.”
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