With elections coming up and early voting underway in many states, I’ll start this post with a reminder to check your voter registration. Just click this link to the nationwide site for the Association of Secretaries of State. Or go online and type in your state and “check voter registration.” Typically the first result will be the Secretary of State’s website for where you live.

And don’t forget that there’s a No Kings march on Saturday, October 17. You can go to NoKings.org to look for an event near you. I’ll be checking on some events in Northern Virginia and attending the Lincoln Memorial event as well.

I think the No Kings movement is useful for a variety of reasons, and have talked about some of those reasons before. But if you still think No Kings seems merely performative, I would say that these next four weeks are the perfect time for performative gestures. Human beings are socially swayed by what others think is normal. And if millions and millions of people come out to say that what’s going on in the U.S. today is unacceptable, that does help shape others’ thoughts and actions.

After the winners of the November 3 election take office, it’s looking more and more likely that Donald Trump will be a lame duck at odds with at least half of a legislative branch that has been overwhelmingly subservient to him for the last two years. Without a veto-proof majority, there may be more deadlock than action on Capitol Hill, but even that will nevertheless provide some respite from the governmental malice unleashed since January 2025 in D.C.

Still, it’s worth taking a moment to recognize how much of what’s problematic in the country predates the golden-escalator ride and Trump’s 2015 emergence as a candidate for president.

Think about just three big stories that have broken in recent days. There’s the botched attempt to execute Christa Pike in Tennessee. And the sexual assault case at Cornell. And then we have the New York Times revealing that Roger Marshall—a U.S. senator from Kansas who is also a doctor—was suing his patients for years, with those lawsuits eventually leading to 81 arrests.

The abuses in these cases—all with roots in moments when Donald Trump was not president—reflect ongoing profound issues in U.S. society. In many cases Trump has exacerbated these societal problems, yet he was also taking advantage of preexisting hatreds and divides to polarize and divide us further.

Stepping back to look at related happenings elsewhere, the election that took place over the weekend in Brazil will have to go to a runoff, because none of the candidates drew more than 50% of the vote on the first ballot. But in last weekend’s vote, Flávio Bolsonaro, son of disgraced authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro, got the most votes, at 47%.

The runoff will happen later this month. Brazil falling solidly back into authoritarianism after its institutions had held the line and gotten rid of the senior Bolsonaro would be a global crisis. It’s a good reminder that an end to Trump’s reign will not be enough to close the door on the current disasters underway in the United States.

So today I want to think about these deeper roots of our problems, the main reason the wealthiest country on this planet is retreating from take care of its population, and how getting rid of an authoritarian leader doesn’t automatically reform the authoritarian-industrial complex. Because even with Trump leaving office in 2028, until we deal with what is at the heart of all of it, we’ll be unable to address the foulness poisoning the core of the United States of America.

Have you checked your voter registration status this month? You should!

Anatomy of an execution

Let’s return for a moment to those three excruciating stories from recent days that aren’t primarily about Donald Trump. First, the lethal injection of Christa Pike, who has been in solitary confinement for three decades, was botched by the state of Tennessee last week. Pike wound up on death row after a violent murder she committed as a teenager—the murder and torture of a classmate.

Whatever you think of the death penalty as an abstract concept (I, for one, am against a state having a legal system that the government uses to execute offenders), last week’s events were horrific. The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.^”

It’s hard to picture how two attempts to do a lethal injection, which involved multiple needles, at least one of them bent, and a report by the condemned that her arm felt like it was about to burst open, and which left her unconscious and on a ventilator would not count as torture. The defense attorneys claim they had specifically warned that Pike’s veins were compromised and that administering the lethal injection would not go smoothly.

This was the first attempted execution of a woman in the state of Tennessee in more than 200 years. She’s been in the hospital since the ordeal and has apparently now regained consciousness. It isn’t yet clear how the state will respond, beyond pausing executions for the time being.

In the midst of the outcry over the gruesome results, some politicians have been calling for bringing back machine-gun executions and hangings. An already punitive state is becoming more brutal, to the cheers of those elected to represent the people.

While Pike’s ordeal was unusual to the degree that she’s a white woman in a penal system more prone to demonizing people of color, it nonetheless offers a snapshot of the extraordinary cruelty and fetishization of punishment of the convicted. When the state has the power to kill those it detains, there is no way for it not to become an arbitrary practice, one that reflects the conditions of the larger society outside.

And while the Trump era has seen an surge in death penalty executions, Trump has been encouraging what was already an ingrained phenomenon. Under Governor Ron DeSantis, the state of Florida alone conducted about 40% of the executions carried out in 2025. What the torture of Pike reveals is a country that has rejected a basic level of humanity.

The Cornell Seven

Women are often deliberately targeted for malevolent actions by government these days—and this tendency has likewise worsened considerably under Donald Trump. But it’s important to remember that plenty of harm has taken place in periods when Trump was not president.

The investigation into the alleged rape at Cornell University in 2024 seems to have been handled badly by the local district attorney there. And the decisions made by Cornell’s administration seem aimed at protecting the men involved far more than finding out what happened or holding people accountable in any serious way.

I spent several years teaching self defense in the D.C. area for a living, from physical tactics to verbal skills of escalation, de-escalation, and negotiation. Part of that job involved teaching regularly on campus at Georgetown University under the auspices of the Women’s Center there. I was also adjunct faculty in the exercise science program at George Washington University, in addition to doing more sporadic instruction at other local colleges and dozens of area organizations and companies.

Many of the women I taught on campus, it turned out, were already survivors of sexual assault. A number of them who had been through the experience had for some time tried to convince themselves that everything was fine, and that they were overreacting to events.

They often did so because they didn’t want to see themselves as a person who couldn’t stop or hadn’t stopped the person who had assaulted them. They didn’t want to think that some friendly guy at a party or in one of their classes, or the guy they were dating, would actually rape someone. It was preferable for many of them for a time to create a delusion in which nothing truly bad had happened, because what had happened was too devastating at a deeper level, even if they managed to keep moving day to day.

Sexual violence is so endemic in our society that it’s a challenge to create a formal process to address it. You can make things criminal, you can work to add protections in various settings, but without a more comprehensive approach, you’re may just wind up putting band-aids on gaping wounds.

One larger attempt to take on the bigger issues was Title IX, a revolutionary civil rights law that went into effect in the 1972. Title IX is what made possible most of the girls’ sports team in U.S. schools; it’s the basis under which demands to deal with sexual assault on college and university campuses have been brought. It started as a set of ideas that have been made real in various ways—some breathtakingly transformational and some more problematic.

But the idea of it—which did not just pop into existence in 1972 but has had to be litigated again and again in the decades since—gave girls and women a beachhead on which to demand rights. Having gone through elementary school in the 1970s as Title IX was implemented, I can attest to the fact that had a huge effect on the way that girls were viewed by boys in school, and even more how girls viewed themselves.

Yet these beachheads established in my lifetime have always been under attack and are now being dismantled. This is a problem in which Trump and his allies are taking an active role in compounding the harm underway today, yet simultaneously a fight that has been going on much longer.

Sued by their doctor

The third story I mentioned at the top of the post was that of U.S. Senator Roger Marshall from Kansas, who worked as an obstetrician in that state for more than a decade. As the New York Times reported, before his entry into national politics, Marshall or his medical practice filed lawsuits against 700 of his patients for nonpayment. Eighty-one of them wound up arrested, in some cases after missing court dates related to the lawsuits. All the debts were on accounts for less than $5,000; one debtor owed just $114.

When payment plans were set up for many of these patients, they were charged 18% interest. Charles Gaba wrote on Bluesky about one woman who mentioned in an interview that she had been on a plan paying $50 a month before she fell behind. Gaba did the math and realized that by paying $50 a month on her debt of $3,600 at 18% interest, she would never be able to pay off the original debt. The program was set up in such a way that she would be paying off the debt indefinitely. (Here’s a link to his full post about it.)

I’m mentioning these examples of the Cornell Seven, the attempted execution of Christa Pike, and a sitting U.S. senator and doctor who had previously sued hundreds of his patients as examples because it’s easy sometimes to think that Trump is responsible for all the cruelty and horror happening now. But in reality, he’s been taking everything that’s bad and making it worse.

And just like the $50 payments on a debt of $3600 at 18% interest, if we don’t start addressing the principal—the underlying problem from which the greater harm spirals out, we’re going to sink deeper and deeper and will never be able to put our larger crisis to rest.

These three examples were all about various forms of mistreatment of women by the state, the university, their doctors, and the legal system. But misogyny is just one path that leads back to the same place many other paths will take you when you trace our current problems to their root.

Bolsonaro, again?

Looking at the international arena shows the same kind of damage and costs. As I mentioned, Flávio Bolsonaro, the current leading candidate and winner of the most votes so far in that country’s presidential election, is the son of disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro. Due to the elder Bolsonaro’s attempts to overthrow the the government and interfere in the 2022 elections, Brazil’s Supreme Court in 2023 barred him from running for national office until 2030.

Conveniently, his son is now running instead. To point this out is not to say that both men are merely figureheads and irrelevant. Jair Bolsonaro’s actions in recent years were stunning crimes, not just theater. But in the bigger picture, these men are primarily a vehicle. While donations from private companies have been banned in Brazil, individual donors have begun to have more influence, not just in determining who wins the presidency, but also in the races for seats in Brazil’s increasingly more powerful Congress.

In the meantime, the younger Bolsonaro, who may well become the next president of Brazil, is already currently under investigation. Unsealed documents from the country’s Supreme Court appear to show issues with alleged corruption and money laundering in relation to his connections with Daniel Vorcaro, the disgraced head of a liquidated bank. Audio exists in which Bolsonaro appears to be asking Vorcaro for large amounts of money.

What is at the root of so many of these stories? Money and power. People with money who want more money. People with power who want more power. Misogyny, racism, fraud, the violence against women, the longstanding brutal justice system, our newer concentration camp system—these are all just tools the powerful use to become more powerful, whether it’s by keeping women down, stoking racial and ethnic hatred, or creating perpetual debt among the poor.

I won’t do a deep dive into Brazil today, but focusing on the domestic front, income inequality and billionaires’ money in politics—not to mention the corruption both are engendering—are the bedrock issues of what ails America. Money is the juice amplifying and directing all the hatred.

What we can do

There is real momentum against Trump and his allies going into the November elections. In the coming weeks, we can door-knock, put up signs, go to No Kings, help make sure your friends and neighbors are voting and have planned how they can get to the polls.

But while we focus on the short term, be looking at what comes after. It won’t be enough to settle for flipping the House and hoping things might improve, only to face anti-incumbent fury when nothing changes for the better even with a Democratic congress.

After November 3, we need to put forth an anti-corruption, pro-accountability platform and act visibly on it. I disagreed profoundly with some Biden policies, but there were also those I thought were important accomplishments for the country. Yet so many Americans never heard about them. Sometimes the performative part of politics is critical.

But now, we’re in a very different place. We’re starting from a point at which much of the Trump administration’s policies are known and loathed. In the coming weeks, it will be especially useful to begin to offer a counterpoint—and where possible, an antidote—to those hated policies, while being clear about what’s still under the control of the administration for the time being.

And when all those local and national officials are elected in November, they should begin do as much as they can to distinguish themselves from Trump and his allies. Substance is important. But if you’re actually doing the substance, and you don’t get the performative part—the visible part—done, too, the credit for whatever you’ve accomplished might simply get claimed by bad actors. Or even worse, the policies might be undone entirely without anyone realizing what was lost. Whatever happens on November 3rd, the next two years should not be about business as usual, but instead about addressing those who are hurting—about creating a meaningful platform for national change and making it heard.

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The latest podcast episode is about how authoritarians eventually stand revealed, even to their followers, and the moment of choice that follows. We are in that moment of choice now, and Trump is becoming more despised by the day. These are all good signs. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

A lot of people are looking toward the elections for salvation or something close to it. And I’ve been trying to address the real possibilities for change that November could bring. But I also often mention the hard reality we’re up against—that even if the Democrats retake both the House and the Senate (which seems more and more possible each week) there’s only so much they can do without a veto-proof majority.

There’s another danger ahead that we should keep in mind after November. I’ve talked about it before as—in the words of Mark Fallon—electoral change that is sometimes a pause instead of a hard stop on a political nightmare.

More than a decade ago, Fallon described President Obama’s actions on Gitmo and torture as more of a pause on the worst War on Terror tactics than any permanent shift. Which is not to say that Obama didn’t reject torture and set a goal of closing Guantanamo. It just means that without accountability and restructuring of agencies and government, no fundamental change happened. Which meant the human rights abuses that had been committed before could take place again.

Donald Trump’s return to office has underlined the ways that this kind “pause” is dangerous. And after he’s gone, we’re going to have to make a lot of changes to move the United States out of rogue-state status internationally and to more fully entrench democracy domestically.

This week, I read a paper in the latest Journal of Democracy from Steven Levitsky, a professor of Latin American Studies and of government at Harvard. He co-wrote it with Lucan Way, a professor of democracy at the University of Toronto. It had some great research-based observations about these very topics.

Both men have written about these issues for several years now, including Competitive Authoritarianism, their book on Cold War governance. They took the tools and methods they developed for that project and analyzed whether the United States in 2026 qualifies as a competitive authoritarian government.

They used eleven criteria for their analysis (see the paper for the full list of criteria), noting that the presence of even one of the eleven qualifies a nation as competitive authoritarian nation. What did they conclude? It’s unlikely to surprise you that, based on the two preceding years under Trump 2.0 , the U.S. met five of the eleven criteria. Those include gerrymandering, harassment of the media, attacks on the civil liberties of critics, packing the media, and “skewing of campaign finance.”

Placing the U.S. in the context of other authoritarian regimes, the authors join a long list of people who have noticed the parallels with Hungary in the last decade, though they note that the U.S. has had “greater civil violations and a less tilted playing field.” And they observe that America has yet to see the threats to open elections of the kind experienced under Yelsin in Russia or Milošević in Serbia.

They also acknowledge the ways that democracy in the United States long had an asterisk next to its status as a democracy, due to its failure to fully enfranchise or guarantee civil liberties to all Americans for most of the years of its existence. As a result, the researchers compared the abuses during the second Trump administration basically to my lifetime, the only period in which any true American democracy could be claimed.

I want to include a few other points they made, because those dovetail very much with arguments I’ve been making about the impossibility of any automatic “return to normal” after Trump leaves office. You’ll see that they’re not at all hopeless.

“If, as we expect, America’s slide into competitive authoritarianism proves short-lived, observers will be tempted to retrospectively classify the United States as a democracy during the second Trump administration. Indeed, following Adam Przeworski’s widely cited characterization of democracy as ‘a system in which parties lose elections,’ scholars frequently equate electoral turnover with democracy. Following this logic, observers may interpret a Democratic Party victory in 2028 as evidence that the United States was continuously democratic between 2025 and 2028.

“That would be a mistake. One of the principal findings of our research on competitive authoritarianism is that opposition parties can (and do) win unfair elections, and that electoral turnover can (and does) occur in nondemocratic regimes. In Hungary, for example, the ruling Fidesz massively abused state resources and engaged in large-scale gerrymandering, and the opposition Tisza party had limited access to mainstream media. Yet Tisza won. The fact that opposition forces prevail despite unfair elections and authoritarian abuse does not mean the unfairness and abuse did not exist in the first place. When Olympic athletes cheat but lose, they are still punished for cheating. If the U.S. Democrats win in 2028, their victory will not wipe away the administration’s persecution of critics, attacks on the media, repression of protesters, or gerrymandering.”

Levitsy and Way note that “if the United States redemocratizes in 2029, it will likely remain an unconsolidated democracy . . . If democracy is restored, Americans should resist the temptation to downplay or forget this authoritarian interlude. Wedded to a myth of exceptionalism, Americans tend to suppress past democratic failures. But the experience of countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Poland, and South Korea suggests a different lesson: Remembering past authoritarianism is essential to preventing its recurrence. If we are to reclaim American democracy and safeguard its future, we must first acknowledge the extent to which it has broken down.”

The good news is that competitive authoritarianism hasn’t yet solidified its stranglehold on the U.S., and we have many tools to fight it. But looking past November, we should keep in mind that the second half of the battle will be the kind of guardrails and accountability that other countries have used to save themselves.

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The story of this summer is in part the story of Trump’s violence and incompetence beginning to turn him from merely an unpopular president to one despised by half or more of the country. Ethnic cleansing in the guise of immigration policy is continuing to alienate more and more people. His lies about the Iran War are exposed every day. In an attempt to soothe his ego, he cannot stop talking about the ballroom, or trying to destroy our federal architectural heritage.

The recent hard turn against him even by some former devotees has as much or more to do with the rising costs of fuel at the pump as it does any newfound embrace of civil and human rights. But we can still make use of his followers’ fury, as we work to alleviate broader suffering and build a better country.

What do people do when faced with incontrovertible evidence that the god emperor at the head of their political movement is a liar, or corrupt. or incompetent? In the end, as the authoritarian’s actions affect more and more of those under his rule, most people—even those who have been completely blind—are forced to choose.

They might finally allow themselves recognize what’s going on, or they might not. Coming to a realization, they might act on it, or they might not. But they know.

Some make their conscious choice early, whether their decision is to walk away from a cult of personality or to cling to the revered leader, even if it triggers estrangement from spouses, friends, and family. Some choose later, when the leader’s ever more ludicrous actions make it impossible for them to ignore the folly of their prior support.

Today, I want to consider that later point—that moment where increasingly ludicrous actions make it impossible for them to ignore what’s happening—because we’re in a significant instance of it right now. I’ll consider the ways public opinion on Trump is shifting, how both institutions and his long-term followers are adapting (or not), and what we can do to encourage the best outcomes through this period of healthy disillusionment.

One key observation about the current crisis is that, unlike similar situations in earlier concentration camp history or other authoritarian states around the globe, people in positions of power are, by and large, not in danger at the moment. Nevertheless, CEO’s, elected officials at every level of government, presidents and boards of universities, and even some judges have caved to Trumpism out of cowardice, corruption, or both—or the belief that they are somehow going to be able to protect their institutions without causing significant damage to them in the meantime. I want to stress this point because one of the most dispiriting aspects of these last two years has been the rapid and utter capitulation by so many who didn’t need to do it.

That said, an important upside and something not to overlook at this moment is that authoritarianism in the U.S. has not yet fully coalesced or completely destroyed democratic institutions. We are well into that chute, and without significant intervention, will soon solidify into competitive authoritarianism ruling over a massive concentration camp system. But several institutions have enough resources remaining to start undoing some of the damage. And the cowardly actors who didn’t stand up and make a difference in the last two years could still do so at little cost to themselves, particularly if people in their orbits put pressure on them.

Unlike so many examples of concentration camp regimes that I’ve explored in the last two years in this newsletter, in the United States today, it’s still possible for nearly all public figures to stand against Trumpism without facing arrest or violence. To the degree that powerful individuals may be at risk for stochastic violence or reprisals from Trump, this is still the optimal time to come forward, because that risk will only increase if Trumpism isn’t stopped now.

The ones who stand up

And the good news is that more and more people are deciding to speak out and stand against the dismantling of the best parts of the country. In some cases, the rejection of Trump is entirely cynical—see for instance the campaign ad from Florida Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar chiding the president on immigration policy. In the same state, Republican candidate for governor Byron Donalds recently removed several references to Trump from his campaign website.

But even cynical rejection hurts Trump. And regular folks are shifting their views and beginning to reject him, too. Of course, there are still farmers who are standing by Trump despite the pain he’s inflicting. But others are not. Some Trump voters are still supporting him, even after ICE harmed their family members. But others have seen it as a bridge too far. During Congressional testimony last week, Donna Ganger—a Trump voter and the mother of Renée Good—testified about the death of her daughter at the hands of an ICE agent last year, and how the loss continues to affect the family.

In other cases, judges are the ones standing up. We’ve been fortunate enough that, as corrupt as the Supreme Court is, several judges in lower courts have continued to work to uphold the best parts of U.S. law. But now we’re seeing a broader shift, in which judges are more often asserting the reality of what is happening on the ground, even to the point of acknowledging the disconnect with reality informing decisions handed down by the Supreme Court itself. This is happening particularly with regard to immigration, as lower court judges begin to set themselves at odds with the abstracted, idealized version of how the violence of “immigration enforcement” is described in court rulings.

I’m thinking particularly of the case of Leonardo Garcia Venegas, which returned to the spotlight again last week. Garcia Venegas is a construction worker and U.S. citizen who has been detained three times, despite showing his STAR ID.

His third time being detained, he was shackled. He told ProPublica, “Honestly, it feels terrible. I drive to work every morning and I know, at any moment, they could pull me over again.”

The judge he made his argument to had heard enough. Last week in Mobile, Alabama, Chief U.S. District Judge Jeffrey U. Beaverstock ordered a nationwide pause on what the plaintiff described as a warrantless entry policy, a preemptive detention policy and a continued detention policy.

“The government offers no factual support whatsoever as to why officers reasonably believed Venegas ‘may be an alien.’” When the government failed to present supporting records or other evidence, the judge was blunter, saying, “The court is simply not inclined to take the government’s word for it.”

Ex parte Endo

For me, some of the shift we’re seeing from judges and public officials recalls a habeas corpus petition I’ve mentioned before: a court case of Mitsuye Endo, which was brought in response to the campaign against (and detention of) Japanese Americans in U.S. camps during World War II. Endo worked for the state of California and was part of a group of employees who were fired as federal policy and public antipathy stoked anti-Japanese sentiment in the wake of Pearl Harbor. (FDR’s February 1942 Executive Order 9066 had opened a door on a process that wound up leading to camps and widespread detention of U.S. citizen and noncitizen immigrants alike.)

The Japanese American Citizens League recruited James Purcell to represent the fired California workers in court, which he did pro bono. Understanding the prejudice that he was up against in the courtroom, Purcell deliberately sought a plaintiff to highlight the bigotry of the government’s actions: a Christian who had been born in the U.S. and never visited Japan, and who had no spoken or written Japanese skills.

Mitsuye Endo fit that bill. Judges wanted badly to be able to assert that they would never justify racism under law, and in Korematsu, the pretended not to be rubber-stamping prejudice. But with Endo, there was literally no excuse that could be made. She endured targeted mistreatment and stonewalling as her case wound its way through the courts over years.

And in the end, she won. Her victory didn’t happen because justices who were willing to deny Fred Korematsu’s rights in his contemporaneous case suddenly pivoted and saw their error. Rather, the justices, faced with Mitsuye Endo, could not conjure the imaginary threat that a majority of them managed to invoke when considering Korematsu’s fate. The decisions in his case (and others) were egregious violations of rights, but it took the Endo petition of habeas corpus to give judges not even a ghost of a gray area in which to excuse racism. They could finally see what they were doing, and were forced to make a decision about it.

Some justices had already understood the errors of judgment rendered by the Court in prior cases. Justice Frank Murphy concurred with the decision in Endo’s petition, but pinned several judgments together for posterity in the statement he added to his concurrence with the decision freeing her:

“I join in the opinion of the Court, but I am of the view that detention in Relocation Centers of persons of Japanese ancestry regardless of loyalty is not only unauthorized by Congress or the Executive but is another example of the unconstitutional resort to racism inherent in the entire evacuation program. As stated more fully in my dissenting opinion in Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu v. United States… racial discrimination of this nature bears no reasonable relation to military necessity and is utterly foreign to the ideals and traditions of the American people.”

The ones who stay home

History is rarely made by single moments, and is more often changed by inches. During World War II, judges kept ruling the same way until they could no longer find any pretext to do so. Because of the work of so many resisting the camps, the process of ending them was already taking shape, but Endo made that outcome inevitable.

Still, whether we’re talking about then or now, not everyone can be counted on. Not everyone will stand up. There are those who will not be able to publicly accept their own gullibility, or the degree of their complicity in the devastation happening around the world and at home. They may never heal the ruptures they’ve caused in their own families and nationwide.

They will make a worse choice, but this tide that is now turning will still affect them. They will be more uncertain about encouraging a public climate of hatred or obviously partaking in it. They’ll be quieter at the Thanksgiving table and may not ruin the day for everyone else. Five weeks from today, if we’re lucky, they’ll be too demoralized about Trumpism, and will not even vote in the midterms.

Trump’s raging unpopularity will create pressure on an institutional level as well—a pressure to push back against the demands made by Trump and his allies. What should have been understood as the better choice from the beginning will seem less frightening as lame duck status kicks in for a widely loathed president. Universities will begin to downplay the administration’s initiatives that they never believed in but were too cowardly to stand against. And like the humiliated uncle at Thanksgiving dinner, they will at least stop unleashing further harm for the time being.

The ones who embrace hate

Any long-term plan to address where we are now is going to have to tackle the challenge posed by another group of people. I don’t believe it’s a majority of voters, but there are those who find all the mayhem of a Trump presidency worth it, as long as the scapegoats they want punished continue to be mistreated. Long-term cultural shifts and the shoring up of democratic institutions can reduce this percentage in our population. But we shouldn’t pretend that no one actually wants the racism and persecution underway right now.

And that’s true at the highest levels. A number of people who were sentimental about the presidency of George W. Bush have been wondering why he hasn’t publicly condemned Trump and what has happened to the Republican Party.

They got their answer, when coverage of Bush in recent days showed him joining in to support a whole slate of Republican candidates in senate races. The answer is that Bush may or may not like Trump himself—and I doubt he does. But he supports what the Republican Party is doing, because this is what he wants.

His decision is a good reminder that opening the blinds and making the Trump’s malicious folly painfully, exquisitely clear won’t lead to everyone being a better person or making the right choice when they are forced to choose. It won’t protect us in the future from those who are nonetheless willing to embrace the message of hate openly promoted by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Stephen Miller, and the hundreds of elected officials who have ceded their authority to the president. A certain number of people can be reclaimed from encouraging punishment of the most vulnerable in our society and our world, but there will be those who will always embrace hate.

The opportunities the moment provides

In your personal life, you can respond however you want to this massive tide against Trump. You can forgive or not, you can rebuke or humiliate people for the harm they’ve helped do, or not. In this post, I’m more focused on what’s strategic for securing the political and social power to block or dismantle the Trump agenda—or to keep it from returning if and when we do manage to shut it down.

On an institutional level, we absolutely need accountability. Demand investigations at every level, even the community level. Who got contracts to operate in your area, who collaborated with attempts to destroy immigrants’ lives, to roll back support for minority communities, and to crush the independence of colleges and universities?

But given that there’s an election very soon, on the personal level, among those with less power, it’s generally more strategic to let everyone come over to your side who wants to come over. Don’t harangue them for past votes or past mistakes. But at the same time you don’t have to beg or make space for them on bigoted or hateful views.

Let them walk beside you for now, if they want to walk in the same direction. Model the generosity you want them to mirror, without giving ground on extending that same generosity to everyone. And when you wake up on November 4, you can always decide what to do next.

Your paid subscriptions support my work.

The latest podcast episode uses the recent report acknowledging there was a solitary confinement device at the Everglades camp known as Alligator Alcatraz—”the box.” I wrote about around the world, across history, there is always a “box.” You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

There’s a topic I’ve been pondering writing about, debating whether to cover it or not. I was thinking maybe today would be a good day for it, but still wasn’t sure. Then, walking my dog and a guest dog at our house this morning, I came across a sign in a neighbor’s yard not far from my house. It read, “SAY NO TO COMMUNISM!!! VOTE REPUBLICAN!”

Though I hadn’t been looking for a sign from that universe, it had sent me a Bat-signal of a message in the form of a literal sign. So today I want to write about rhetoric around capital-C Communism (not about the substance of Communism itself).

Scare tactics referencing Communism on the right have taken off in recent weeks, and not just on yard signs. There are two key examples of this surge (online and off) of deploring the threat of Communism in the U.S. One is among MAGA Republicans, the other is among their opponents.

First, As Trump’s mid-September rally for the MAGA faithful in Dallas showed, the Republican strategy right now is to label every Democrat a communist. Faced with displeasure over the condition of the country after two years of a Republican trifecta (House, Senate, presidency), along with the collapse of the anti-immigrant hatred they had nursed so successfully for so long, Trump and his allies have resorted to shouting “COMMUNIST” at every turn.

The U.S. is no more in danger of turning Communist than I am of playing in the NFL. Which means this talk is, in part, a lazy strategy due to simple desperation. But it’s also a sign of the advanced age of much of Republican leadership.

For those who grew up during the Cold War, the Communist bogeyman was a theme of life. It was the fallback smear used to disparage domestic foes. The basic suggestion was that—due to fifth-column traitors inside the country collaborating with Soviet agents to destroy free markets, Christianity, and freedom itself—the U.S. was on the brink of succumbing to Communism.

It was a dishonest assertion, and a nasty way to transform examples of governance that had killed millions and led to the creation of police states around the globe into a jump-scare accusation that harmed careers and ruined lives here in the U.S. The use of the term today by Republicans terrified of losing the midterms is a flashback to the mercenary appeals to fear and ignorance under McCarthyism, and all the harm that hysteria trailed in its wake.

But another use of the word Communism as a epithet has also been on the rise recently. This use takes place most often in online battles between people who’ve never met—though, depending on the company you keep, you could encounter this argument cropping up in real life as well.

You may be blissfully unaware that there is a group of people who make it a habit to defend or dismiss the nastiest exploits of Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong, despite the toll in lives and suffering that the rule of both men took on the countries they led. Pressed on the matter, rather than address authoritarians’ crimes, they will point to U.S. brutality and militarism, as well as racism and the cruelties endured by the poorest citizens in many capitalist democracies. These defenders are commonly referred to as “tankies,” a pejorative that sometimes also gets arbitrarily applied more broadly than it should.

Lately, Mao in particular has been appearing in online discourse, and it reminds me of something that comes up intermittently. In this age of vice signaling, wherein the party currently in power continually signals how much harm they are willing to do to vulnerable people, I do think virtue signaling has a role. It’s worthwhile to promote decency, humanity, kindness and accountability.

And sure, if you want to remind people that you’re personally against Stalin and Mao, or that you’re opposed to communism, go for it. There are certainly people out there doing the opposite—trying to move the Overton window with arguments supporting the governing philosophies of any number of history’s monsters.

But there’s one thing I also see that I want to point out, because my sense is that it’s just not useful. I see people posting snippets on Bluesky asserting the utter evil of Mao, or of global Communism, using the same weird kind of bogeyman rhetoric that the McCarthyites used. It’s as if Mao were the Marvel villain in the movie about 21st-century America, or as if Communism were a powerful force lurking behind every door and about to destroy the U.S. And then they have little else to say.

And of course the tankies scream over this. But I also see reasonable people squirming, and I sometimes count myself among them.

You do not, in any event, have to hand it to Stalin or Mao. At the same time, it’s not productive to keep posting about them for no reason except to denounce someone else for talking about them if you don’t have any real knowledge of the history involved and can’t effectively rebut the arguments made by tankies or other sympathizers.

Mao and Stalin and other communist leaders gained power in different ways in different eras. Marxists in Latin America or Africa had their own methods and motivations, which sometimes overlapped with or received support from those flagship communist states. If all you can say is that Communism is evil, and you keep inserting yourself in the discourse, you just start to sound like my mother’s third husband (RIP), who believed that Nancy Pelosi was an actual demon under Satan’s control. You’re expressing an article of faith, not making a historical argument.

People are allowed to have articles of faith—it’s a free country. And there are many reasons to state your values in this era of mercenary murder. Values are important signposts now, when the current leaders of the United States of America are causing the deaths of some million people around the globe through USAID cuts, assassinating civilians on boats at sea, and running an expanding concentration camp system at home. But you do not help your own cause when you show up to an argument with little or nothing in the way of receipts.

For the record, I absolutely think global history is worth studying. I’ve spent a lot of years doing it myself. And what I found researching a history of concentration camps around the world was that every ideology was vulnerable to authoritarianism. And detainees had some common experiences worldwide, but those experiences were very much shaped by the local culture and history.

Yet it was also true that civic institutions built under the governing ideology could sometimes play a role in stopping the expansion of camps at an earlier point or undoing the authoritarian threat. So I’ve become a big fan of panoramic awareness of authoritarian systems—what’s unfolding on a global level—but also the ways that a country’s history shapes what happens. It is often on the weird and local margins that we see systems begin to crumble

So whatever your political beliefs, if you’re spending a lot of time talking about the threat of Communism or Mao’s crimes as part of discourse about U.S. politics in 2026, you are likely taking the spotlight off what’s going on right here, now, today.

Mao is dead, and a few Democratic Socialists have been elected to office. But they are not storming the halls of Congress. There is no Bolshevik Revolution underway.

What has grown out of America’s historical weaknesses instead is the coup of January 6, 2021—an event slower to secure power, but one with just as many ramifications, and perhaps as many risks, as any other revolution or tyrant whose legacy you might care to debate. And the history unfolding in this moment is the only trajectory you can act to change.

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Last week, images of metal cages for single prisoners at the Everglades concentration camp known as Alligator Alcatraz made the rounds. They’d been part of a report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, alleging several problems at the facility that had first been stood up in July 2025, before being decommissioned in June.

The report said that authorities claimed metal cages were used in January 2025 for a total of 79 people, with none of them held for more than two hours. These details are clearly not the whole story. But the report’s findings are nonetheless striking, because use of “the box” had been reported since the opening weeks of the camp in the summer of 2025.

A photo of the isolation cages from the DHS Inspector General’s 2026 report.

At that time, NPR played audio of a 21-year old Nicaraguan detainee who, more than a year ago, described his experience in “the box”—how he was chained to the ground in a cage in the hot sun. When one of the other detainees complained about it, they were subjected to the same treatment.

The report didn’t unearth that kind of abuse, and didn’t claim to have confirmed administrators’ statements that no one was held in the cages for more than two hours. But there are multiple accounts, from Amnesty International and elsewhere, that “the box” was not a glorified time-out room, but a site of torture and abuse.

Nevertheless, the IG’s report introduced into the official record a number of serious problems. And online and on television, it was the image of those cages that made the biggest impression, along with the report’s acknowledgment that their use posed “significant risks to detainee health and safety.”

Today I want to write about the uses of solitary confinement, why every lawless system comes to it, why it’s always abused, and how it fits into the world of concentration camps and prisons alike.

The family of Arthur Maillefert. (Photo: Jack Spottswood, courtesy of the State Library and Archives of Florida)

First, I’ve called the Everglades Camp a concentration camp since its beginning, because it fits the bill of mass detention of civilians without due process on the basis of identity for the political benefit of a leader or party. And it’s a particular kind of camp—one we’ve seen in a number of places before. It especially mirrors the ad-hoc and wild abuses of early starter camps that helped set the stage for much larger entrenched systems in the past.

Several years before the official creation of the Soviet Gulag, the camp at Solovki entered the world as a site of horrors. The complex sat on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, off the coast of northwestern Russia.

Before the U.S.S.R. was established, the site had been an isolated monastery for nearly five hundred years. With the Church’s authority very much backing monarchical rule during the Bolshevik Revolution, priests and churches became political targets in the Soviet state. After early escapes by detainees held in concentration camps built on the mainland, Solovki was seized, its buildings converted to a giant camp complex.

This was still in the early stages of the U.S.S.R., so all kinds of tortures were carried over from the Tsarist era. But others were improvised on the spot. Some of the worst treatment took place in solitary confinement—in what were called the penal isolators—of the Ascension Church on Mount Serkinaya.

As the Gulag took root later that decade, more formal, purpose-built camps came into existence, with sheds and buildings constructed specifically for isolation. Some isolation cells might keep two or three people sequestered from the rest of the camp, with prisoners given severely reduced rations of water and less than eight ounces of bread a day. But odinochki, the smaller cells built to punish a single individual, played a more traumatic role.

In early Nazi camps, similar isolation spaces for hazing and torture were likewise improvised. At the Kemna concentration camp, detainees were stuffed into metal lockers, which guards blew smoke into or flipped over, inventing new tactics as they went.

Later, in Vietnam, five-foot metal shipping containers in the hot sun would be used as “the box.” Every camp system riffed on when and how to use severely constricted solitary confinement. As a practice, it was as common as dirt.

Solitary confinement abroad and at home

And while solitary confinement in a concentration camp is one of the most dehumanizing and hopeless places on the planet, it isn’t necessary to even look at concentration camps to see the effects of this kind of treatment.

More than a decade ago the U.N. special rapporteur for torture Juan E. Méndez said that solitary confinement, as it is used around the globe, amounts to torture in most cases, with lasting mental damage caused after just a few days of social isolation.

And U.S. prisons today, and every day, tens of thousands of people remain in solitary confinement, including juvenile offenders. Since Congressional action in 2018, the country has gotten to a point where twenty-nine states have barred punitive solitary confinement for juveniles. But its use continues in many others. As you might guess, people of color are disproportionately represented among those languishing in solitary—as are trans folks and the mentally ill.

Historical confinement in the U.S.

The use of both solitary confinement and what has long been known as “the box” is far from a new phenomenon. In the wake of the Civil War, a contract labor system in the U.S. rose up in states like Georgia to replace slave labor with incarcerated workers. And just as slavery had done, the new system made use of “the sweat box” for punishment, along with physical assaults and other kinds of abuse.

It was a common apparatus, even in Florida, the state home of Alligator Alcatraz. A TIME magazine story from the 1930s noted the death of one inmate subjected to the box. What follows is the lede from that story.

“On the afternoon of June 3, Arthur Maillefert, 22. of Westfield. N. J., serving nine years for stealing $30. was found strangled to death in the "sweatbox" of Duval County's Sunbeam prison camp. A sweatbox is a windowless outdoor solitary confinement cell little bigger than a coffin. According to Florida law it should be 3 ft. broad. There should be ventilation. Arthur Maillefert. called "Jersey" by his prison mates, had passed the previous evening in the sweatbox naked and inside a barrel out of which he tried to gnaw.”

The evolution of concentration camps

Even this brief survey makes clear that the existence of a concentration camp isn’t required in order for the cruel use of solitary confinement and devices like the box. But as an institution, concentration camps are inherently more dangerous over time, because camps are an end run around the existing system of detention. That end run is made because there’s some harm the governing party or leader wants to inflict that the existing system won’t let them turn to.

And each big system that gets created brings something new with it. The U.S. is in the process of building one of the largest camp systems in history. What is Trump 2.0 adding? Think of it as a kind of parallel to Putin seizing Crimea from Ukraine, which was largely done in the open, while Moscow denied it was happening.

But with Trump 2.0, he ran on the idea of activating hate against vulnerable groups and promising people he would remove millions of human beings from society. Trump and Stephen Miller ran on creating massive camps.

The concentration-camp settings created during George W. Bush’s War on Terror were predominantly black sites, and the government tried to keep them secret. Since returning to office Trump, has done the opposite.

He’s made dozens of agreements to deport immigrants into other countries that appear happy to detain them indefinitely under horrific conditions in exchange for whatever corrupt bill of goods those governments have been promised. But I’m delighted to report that late last week, a judge blocked Trump’s third-country programs, saying they did not meet the requirements for due process.

The reason for the box

Given that over the last year, detainees at the Everglades Camp have reported at least two sizes of “the box”—the 4’ X 4’ cages and the 2’ X 2’ ones—it’s entirely possible the site had isolation cells in various sizes. Only a full investigation will be able to determine the number and kinds of spaces used as punishment isolators.

Ostensibly, the reason for the existence of solitary confinement and spaces like “the box” is for those who are a danger to guards or to other prisoners or detainees, or even themselves. But in camps, there’s a tremendous gap between the rationale for these spaces and their actual use.

While the administration embraces Nazi race language and visuals, as well as authoritarian memes from the around the world, I don’t think more than one or two Trump gang members have actually read any concentration camp history. It’s true that Trump supporters sometimes wear t-shirts celebrating the disappearances and murders under Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, when bodies were thrown from helicopters. But ICE officers aren’t staying up late at night studying those tactics today. They don’t need to. A newer category of the “disappeared” has taken shape.

The twenty-first century “disappeared”

On one hand, one newer kind of disappearance we’ve heard about this week happens when ICE removes the names and whereabouts of detainees who have final deportation orders from their tracker system, making it much more difficult to find out where and under what conditions people are being held. And on the foreign side of disappearances, we’ve seen even more innovation. The Office of Remigration, established in the second Trump presidency, has been disappearing people to third countries where they’re held in prisons indefinitely. In other cases, detainees have even been sent back to homelands in which they face a high risk of death.

Still, in the U.S., the box has a longer history than these kinds of disappearances, having arisen again and again in countless settings. The wish to imprison people who are seen as threats and to remove people from society has led to prisons in which the law is not applied evenly, or kept at all.

I’ve mentioned before that if you bake with the same ingredients, you’re going to wind up with a similar kind of cake. And in this case, the administration is reinventing the arc of concentration camps, even as it repeats the history of U.S. prisons. But now, they’re starting from even more heinous first principles, with even less oversight.

Let me repeat that the rationale for a thing’s existence does not necessarily correspond to how it is actually used or applied. The justification for the box was to keep law and order, but in reality it came into being as a way to further punish those who had been subjected to some of the worst conditions on Earth.

I want to address the larger issue here. The reason that there’s always a box is because when the prime goal is punishment, the long-term detention of people is always going to create a space for the next worse thing.

It’s partly a process of normalization, as many have noted about our current nightmare. But it’s also true that prisons with heinous conditions will never be enough for those who want more power than they can get in the existing system. Which leads to a penal system in which lawless conditions are allowed to flourish. Which leads to a concentration camp—sites meant to avoid the constraints of laws and due process entirely.

But even that isn’t enough, because the existence of the targeted group can be further exploited by those in power. Even a concentration camp needs a next-worse place to send people, in order to punish them more severely.

Solitary confinement and the box are an attempt to remove even the possibility of community solidarity from those targeted groups in camps. The use of the box in a concentration camp becomes an abyss within an abyss. And left unchecked, we know that historically, these abysses open the door to physical annihilation at scale. Because corrupt power will find a way to exact a higher cost if it can reap benefits from the greater suffering of more people.

What is to be done?

I’ve written before that when I taught self-defense to children in pre-kindergarten, part of what I taught them was to learn to spot when someone is trying to trick them. An important lesson for adults to learn—which we can help others learn—is that “the box” is always a trick. Whatever the rationale given for doing it, targeting whole groups for removal from society or for suffering, even in small ways, opens a door. And without being permanently closed, that doorway leads to the next abuse, and the next.

What the Trump administration is doing is trying to drive every strategy in every arena of existence toward “the box”—the most isolating and vulnerable, the most physically and psychologically punishing conditions. They’re consigning Medicaid recipients to horrific treatment and lack of resources that will harm millions. They’re killing hundreds of thousands of women and children around the world simply for being dependent on U.S. aid. They’re destroying universities. They’re trying to drive trans people out of society. They are ethnically purging the country as a whole, for personal profit.

It’s critical to step outside the scaremongering and the rhetoric of hate to explain what’s really happening. Despite having more power than anyone on the planet, Trump wants more. He wants to exploit the powerless and scare people into giving him more control.

What can we do? Take back power locally, set standards within your community, call out the harms being done directly there to everyone—to immigrants, to government workers, to veterans, to schoolchildren and the elderly. Whatever your cause, there’s plenty of room to work.

There is always a box, and our job is twofold. First, we don’t let anyone get put inside the box. And second, we destroy the box.

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The latest podcast episode explores how surveillance powers authoritarianism—and how, in the twenty-first century, that means a fusion of corporate and government spying. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

Today, I want to address the ways that big things continue unfolding, for bad and for good. Just because the situation in your neck of the woods might seem quieter doesn’t mean the whirlwind has diminished.

I’ll go through a few entries from the bad side of the ledger, because it’s easy to tune out just how much evil our government is inflicting around the world and at home. (But I’ll keep it brief, so as not to overwhelm anyone.) Several detainees the U.S. has sent to Equatorial Guinea are languishing in isolation, with the New York Times sharing witnesses’ reports about men who’ve been “hooded, bound, beaten with guns and shoved down a flight of stairs recently by police officers at a remote hotel where immigrants are being held indefinitely.”

Turning to the Caribbean, after a sudden end to Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of people, more than four hundred Haitians have been deported into tremendous danger and instability. Trump and his allies are also detaining a group of several Somali immigrants without criminal records at Guantanamo Bay, which—according to detainee accounts of guards’ explanations—is the result of nothing more than a generalized animosity toward Somali people at the highest levels of the current administration.

One of those men held at Gitmo is Adam Abdullah, who came to the U.S in 2023 seeking asylum. He’s a legal U.S. resident with no criminal history. (I point this out only to show how far removed the rhetoric of the Trump administration is from the reality of what they’re doing.)

Trump’s war on Iran remains a disaster, whether considered through the lens of rising gas prices, the damage to military bases, or—the most important metric—the loss of human lives. Today, Bloomberg reported that Palantir’s Maven AI was used as a tool earlier this year in the decision to bomb a school, killing 120 schoolchildren. 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently testified that he doesn’t know anything about the billions of dollars that the U.S. has taken from Venezuela as a result of the coup launched by the administration and the corrupt agreement on oil with interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez.

The list goes on. It can seem like everything is hopeless. And yet… we’re hearing about some of these abuses through public Congressional testimony. This week, Congress also voted to block Trump from taking further military action on Iran for the third time. The Senate has, so far, not been followed suit. But I would argue these votes are still critical, providing cover for a shift in support away from Trump and setting the stage for post-election action.

Along those lines, Republican Congressman Thomas Massie even surprised his party leadership this week, introducing eight articles of impeachment calling for the impeachment of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Names are being taken, and markers put down. A trail for future accountability is being laid.

Trump was yet again foiled in his attempt to put his name on the Kennedy Center in recent days, with a judge blocking any significant renovation or demolition on the building, and demanding thirty days’ notice of any plans to do work. And earlier this week, a group of researchers filed a class-action lawsuit over the use of political or arbitrary censorship to reject or cut grants from the National Institutes of Health on any number of forbidden topics. These researchers are risking their careers and potentially even their current grants to fight to correct the gross abuses of the system which determines so much about the health and welfare of Americans.

The call terrifying Trump and his allies is now sometimes coming from inside the house. Even the Department of Homeland Security’s own Office of the Inspector General did a report on the concentration camp in the Everglades officially known as Alligator Alcatraz, acknowledging some of the mistreatment witnesses have been alleging for more than a year.

I talked a little about the report with Gillian Brockell, a journalist who’s partnering with the American Prospect to cover immigrant deportation (and who has made a name for herself tracking deportation flights this year). While the IG’s report does not reflect even a fraction of the abuses that have been mentioned by detainees at the camp, it is a first step, and opens the door to Congressional hearings and probes that can serve the public by unearthing the whole story. “Alligator Alcatraz” has been shut down. But its turn in the spotlight should not end until everything is known.

A new poll on immigration from Fox News (!) shows that a majority of Americans thinks Trump’s approach to immigration enforcement has gone too far. If this seems like the most obvious conclusion ever, keep in mind how staggering the shifts have been of late in immigration policy. Millions of people have no fixed opinion at all or any commitment to human rights, let alone gratitude for the critical role immigrants have played and are playing nationwide.

It’s terrible that issues so critical to the safety of U.S. residents and so crucial to the future of the country were able to shift so rapidly in ways that helped Trump before the 2024 election. And it’s a relief that these attitudes have swung back toward a more humane approach.

Yet it’s obvious that Americans who supported the current draconian approach could shift back again in a matter of months the other way. However, the Trump administration is running out of time. In the second half of the second Trump administration, its own criminality and disregard for humanity across the board is finally catching up to it. With their neighbors rounded up and the conditions of life made harder and harder even for those who supported Trump, some of his followers can no longer delude themselves.

Courts are taking more serious stances as well. Just today, a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the Trump administration’s claim of receiving guarantees of safety for immigrants deported to third countries are insufficient protection of the rights of detainees.

A lot of people are putting all their hopes in the November elections. But they can’t be the only answer, because our problems are deep-seated and will require bigger solutions than a single vote. At the same time, they are the next big hurdle. Free and fair elections remain our biggest cudgel and lever at the moment—the process whereby the public can show up and make itself heard most powerfully.

Over the last two years, so many people have written me asking what they can do to make a difference. Many of those people went on to work against ICE facilities coming to their counties, against data centers for which their community had been given no say, and against agreements supporting collaboration between their town’s law enforcement and ICE.

Others have told me they’ve been hesitant about getting involved, for fear of being arrested or losing their jobs. If you are one of those people, this is your moment. An election is a perfect project for those who are risk-averse or trapped by family circumstances.

Find a candidate you can really support at any level of office, and get involved at this critical time. We have just over six weeks left until November 4.

Trump is unbelievably unpopular, to the point that some allies facing reelection are now fleeing their association with him. The tide is already turning. Help get the accountability train rolling. Phone bank, knock on doors, raise money. But be sure to get something in return, as well. Tell the people you’re supporting that you expect them to stand up, stop the nightmare, and deliver some justice.

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Gamers Nexus reported weeks ago that some LG televisions and monitors are intruding on customers’ lives in unsetting ways, from inserting recurring ads into monitors to possessing the capacity to record private conversations you have in your home. The story got more traction in recent days, with several “Can they really do that?’ posts.

In another development last week, mathematician Tristan Buckmaster wrote that OpenAI announced its AI had solved a longstanding problem—one the company knew Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge had been working on. The pair had been using several LLMs, including one from OpenAI, as a tool to assist them. Buckmaster made no direct accusations, but the letter raises implicit questions about whether someone at Open AI accessed the mathematicians’ work intentionally or inadvertently in order to hijack the humans’ discovery for the company.

And just this week, 404 Media posted a story about private human contractors involved with what’s known as “Project Lily.” They’ve been hired to go through users ChatGPT chats—conversations which often include highly personal data—without users’ knowledge.

I’m not a tech expert, so I’m going to come at how all these are related a little sideways. My intent is to stay in my lane and address what the issues raised by these examples mean in the current political climate. I’ll consider some historical examples of authoritarian surveillance, what it means to have a government that is seeking to oppress millions within a country’s borders alongside private companies looking to harvest personal information for profit, and how corporate overlords and aspiring dictators wind up collaborating in a police state.

In a post last year, I mentioned a complaint made in 1937 by Chief of German Police Heinrich Himmler. Himmler lamented how insufficient his surveillance tools were in the face of so many enemies of the state.

“What does it mean, putting a man under surveillance?” he wrote. “For that I need at least three officials per day—there are 24 hours in a day—these three officials need two cars, because if the fellow is at all clever, he’ll leap from one streetcar to another… So it can’t be done without five officials.”

Every police state is limited by its ability to track everyone it wants to. Different authoritarian governments respond to that challenge in different ways. In East Germany during the Cold War, the government spying apparatus employed a quarter-million employees, the majority of whom were informants—estimated to be 1 in 40 people in the country. Including part-time and unpaid spies, estimates of the overall number of informants have gone as high as one in every 6.5 citizens living in East Germany at the time.

While the U.S. never reached those levels in the same period, the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation worked to spy on, “misdirect, discredit, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize” those it saw as enemies. From the Ku Klux Klan to feminists and leftist students, the FBI conducted unethical and illegal surveillance on countless groups, but particularly targeted Black activists and community leaders.

When COINTELPRO stood revealed in the 1970s, backlash followed, and guardrails were installed. In some cases, those guardrails have since been dismantled. In other cases, technology has simply vaulted beyond the legislation from that era. I won’t go into all the failed privacy battles and lapsed protections here. The important thing to understand is that new tech has made surveillance possible on a level that Himmler never dreamed of.

The state-corporate nexus

In the twenty-first century, China has built a staggering surveillance system pioneered for use against the Uyghur population in the autonomous region of Xinjiang. That system has become a pervasive and invasive collaboration of companies with party leadership, and has provided tech and/or served as a model for repressive governments elsewhere. Among other countries, facial-recognition technology has been exported for use in Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

The U.S. and Europe have taken action against some of these Chinese companies. But simultaneously, tech developments by companies based in the U.S. represent their own category of rising threat to every person on the planet. But maybe not for the reasons you’re hearing about most.

You may recall that for taking a stance against its technology being used for autonomous killing machines and mass domestic surveillance, Anthropic was blackballed by the government. Unfortunately, other AI companies stepped in where Anthropic wouldn’t go in that moment.

Yet Anthropic has played its own role in problematic police-state issues—though perhaps one it had not intended to. The company reported just days ago that its Claude AI models had been used overseas, including in China, for activities ranging from “weapons development and cyber operations to surveillance and fraud.”

Not every surveillance company is primarily an AI company, of course. Just this week, WBUR in Boston broke the story that “three days into a pilot program with the Boston Police Department, city officials realized Flock Safety had been distributing data it promised not to share with external law enforcement agencies, according to the city’s 2025 Surveillance Technology Report.” The sharing of data had been specifically prohibited in the city’s trial contract with the company, yet other agencies had search the data from the new Boston cameras repeatedly.

An Electronic Frontier Foundation data project also published this week discovered that despite official requirements for a lawful reason to search license plates when searching Flock camera databases, officers frequently typed in phrases like “LMAO,” “IDK,” and “Hehe.”

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Grok/xAI is facing new accusations that its artificial intelligence has produced child sexual abuse material based on photos of actual crimes. And last week, Ars Technica reported that Meta ads pushed apps nudifying real teens. The apps allowed clients digitally alter images of children using AI, and Ars Technica found that the photos in the ads were manipulated versions of identifiable photos of real teens findable online.

These are all different kinds of surveillance for profit. Authoritarian governments are more interested in controlling you than protecting you. Companies are less invested in that agenda directly, but in many cases, stand to gain from it.

So much data is now collected on every one of us; yet it’s imperative to set limits where we still can. In the case of LG TVs, the televisions have the capability of monitoring other devices in the household and recording conversations in the room. While gathering this information for their own purposes, companies effectively surveil their clients.

Surveillance becomes valuable in several ways. By watching you more, companies can come to understand how to better manipulate you and make you more dependent on them. In theory, this information could be used to better serve your needs. But what we’ve seen a lot in the last decade is that through the process of what’s come to be called enshittification, the more dependent you are on the company’s product, the less the quality of their product will matter to them. They’ve already captured you.

So in truth, you can just wind up in thrall in a different way than you are with surveillance done by the government. In the latest example, the AI-ification of life, externalization of your own skills and knowledge has real risks. But when surveillance puts you at the mercy of a police state, that’s another level of danger altogether.

What can you do?

On the national and international level, surveillance tech needs to be regulated. But what if the governments involved are a threat to their own constituents? Who would you trust in the federal government today to regulate artificial intelligence?

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is arguing for greater control by the government, but to do so, he partnered this week with Steve Bannon, a proven demagogue and threat to civil rights across the board in the United States. Working across the aisle is one thing. Working with someone who tried to sabotage the country is something else altogether.

That said, the tech oligarchs seem to be using a potential AI safety pause mostly to block out their overseas rivals. It seems hardly anyone in power is approaching the issue in good faith.

There’s likely not time to stake the surveillance issue out in a thorough and comprehensive way before the November elections. But it should be on national politicians’ radar in 2028 as part of an agenda of revitalizing democracy (a theme the House Democratic super PAC leadership has been hostile about spotlighting for the midterms).

On the household level, there are simpler things you can do. Turn off the microphones on your TV if you don’t want it to have the option of eavesdropping on you. Tom’s Guide has a good post from last year on how to do that. (But be aware that you’ll also disable the voice features on your remote.)

Be aware of how often you are outsourcing your skills and ability to do tasks that AI cannot do as well as you or which will degrade your own abilities over time in ways that matter (see, for instance, the effects of using AI on students and doctors).

However you feel about new tech as a concept, always ask yourself what the risks are to incorporating it on an institutional level. Should it really be in your schools or universities? At what age? What happens to the data generated by those students?

Should it be in your workplace? What liability issues does that raise, if the AI companies can access that data and turn it over to other people? How can we protect people’s private sessions with agents from being sold or seen by others without the user’s consent?

Remember that once doors are opened on surveillance, they’re very hard to close. In addition, the leaders of the most prominent AI companies in the U.S. are for the most part, bad actors who are actively destabilizing democracy—and, in many cases, the planet. Their leaders are not trustworthy on matters of surveillance.

One of the tremendously disappointing, though not surprising, developments of the last decade has been the ways that companies have utterly failed to stand up to the dangers represented by authoritarian states. And with cutting-edge technology, aspiring dictators won’t need one out of 6.5 people to become informers, as happened in East Germany during the Cold War period. They won’t need a massive police force of dedicated secret police to trail suspects, as Himmler longed for in Germany (although they clearly have one with ICE). They just need people to want more new toys badly enough to ignore they’re being watched for long enough to establish a seamless network that will be too entrenched to undo.

Donald Trump said yesterday that the only regulation AI needs is a smart president with a High IQ. But we already know that the worst surveillance technology has been used in damaging ways to kill people even by smart presidents who imagined themselves to be good actors. And if there’s anything that Donald Trump’s political career has taught us, it’s that in the hands of openly corrupt leaders and amoral oligarchs who bend the knee to authoritarians, the risks of giving these people any new power are exponentially higher.

I’m not trying to terrify you, but instead to motivate you. Harder battles than this one have been won before. You don’t have to believe even a single apocalyptic sci-fi scenario about sentient AIs (I don’t) to understand that it’s the oligarchs developing tools with surveillance capabilities and the corrupt officials in positions of power—those who are eager to exert control over the public—who are the real threat.

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The latest podcast episode explores how twenty-first century authoritarians are nostalgic for the symbols and violence of their predecessors, but the common thread today is the global demonization of immigrants. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

A detail from a painting by former President George W. Bush of himself, done to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.

So many people are writing about 9/11 today on the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks. I’ve described that day in the newsletter a little before—explaining what it was like being in Northern Virginia and DC in the midst of it all. But today, I want to address another aspect of that tragedy, one that relates more directly to the present day.

People under thirty, or maybe even forty, may not have been following events enough in their youth to remember that the Bush administration had been made aware back in 2001 that a terror attack using American airplanes was in the planning. Even all these years later, it’s painful to contemplate what might have been prevented: the thousands of deaths a quarter-century ago today; the use of international support in the aftermath to launch wars, create black sites, and commit torture around the world; and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

Recent reports from Haaretz inspired a similar agony, as readers learned that not only was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned in advance about the attacks that took place October 7, 2023, but the warning had come to him from a UAE official who had been told directly by a Hamas official. The paper further reported that the Israeli government ceded its hostages to the terrorists very early on. From the beginning, the official response seemed to prioritize slaughter and revenge.

These shocking discoveries don’t confirm the countless conspiracy theories about 9/11 or 10/7. Instead, the conclusions they imply feel somehow worse. No conspiracy was necessary. There was no grand plan by those with the most power to deceive the public by staging an attack. Officials’ arrogant negligence and failure to listen or do their jobs simply allowed terrorists to kill at will.

In both cases, the much greater violence unleashed in the aftermath of terror attacks destabilized the world and led to the death of civilians, including countless women and children. And it’s both an American and a global tradition to look back after horrific government overreaction, waving cruelty and even crimes away by saying “everyone panicked” or “no one knew it could go so wrong.”

In my experience looking at history, however, this is rarely the case. Again and again, not only were contingents of people speaking up at crucial moments, standing against the deep harm that specific government policies or institutions would inflict, but they often predicted exactly the outcomes that would follow.

An early example of such harm was the decision to maintain chattel slavery at the founding of the United States. Many of the Founders were well aware of how damaging it was but moved forward, despite an abolition movement among settlers in North America beginning nearly a century before before the Revolution.

Another example is the first concentration camps, imposed by Spain on its then-territory of Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century. Arsenio Martínez Campos, in charge of Spanish forces, believed that removing and reconcentrating the rural population behind barbed wire and fortifications might be the only way to defeat the rebels. But even then, he understood that to do so would lead to “horrible misery and hunger.” To his credit, Martínez Campos resigned, but his replacement instituted reconcentración, bringing modern concentration camps into the world and leading to the deaths of more than 150,000 people.

I remember talking to my grandfather decades ago. He had served as a navigator during World War II in Asia, and that service had been the high point of his life. I once asked him about the tragedy of Japanese Americans—most of them U.S. citizens—being herded into detention camps during the conflict. He gave me a longer version of the “we panicked” story, explaining that no one knew it was wrong at the time.

And my grandfather might have been sincere in his belief, but U.S. Naval Intelligence, along with many key members of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, had understood perfectly that it would be a mistake and perhaps even a risk to create concentration camps for Japanese Americans. They proceeded anyway, due to political pressure.

The trend holds right up to the present. After the October 7 attack, President Biden went to Israel, and in a public speech, compared the aftermath of that tragedy to 9/11. He understood the rage that Israelis felt, he said, but also told his listeners, “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it.” He said the United States had made mistakes in the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers.

Joe Biden was far from devoted to Palestinian safety, and would end up prioritizing and supplying the very rage-filled massacres he went to Israel to warn against eleven days after the attack. Yet he knew, and told Netanyahu, with neither of them heeding his words.

The older I get, the more I learn that public memory is a fleeting thing. It has to be maintained and protected. People don’t learn permanent lessons.

Why bring all this up on 9/11? To point to the next obvious tragedies, crises we’re all aware of, ones that are already underway, but which are being met with negligent non-responses or outright dismissal by people in power far more often than not.

This 9/11, I would ask you to remember the ethnic cleansing led by an administration that currently prioritizes admitting white immigrants only, and has only gotten started on removing millions of brown and black people from the country—overwhelmingly vulnerable people not even charged with crimes. I would ask you to consider the degree to which by creating punitive laws in red states and threatening hospitals in blue states, the government and its lackeys are working hard to make it impossible to exist as a trans person in much of the United States.

When someone like U.S. Senate candidate from Texas James Talarico caves to demands that he will vow to support the discrimination and the denial of rights to a community that just had those rights taken away, it is not some fringe hypothetical about a debate over something abstract (even if is presented in bad faith within a dishonest frame). He is participating in rearranging deck chairs on the next disaster, which has already begun. You don’t have to be at the helm of the ship to harm others.

I don’t know anyone who supports trans rights who would rather have a monster like Ken Paxton than Talarico in the U.S. Senate. But I also think it’s clear enough what’s happening that those who wish to be our leaders shouldn’t go along with it. The biggest danger is when you pretend you don’t see what’s going on—that nobody warned you. You leave all the bad actors free to persecute others.

Looking back at 9/11, I can remember how, at first, the day seemed terrible enough that I though it would loom over every national disaster of my adult life. But really, the first heartbreaking tragedy is only the beginning. And the greater the number of people who don’t see what they don’t want to—or refuse to acknowledge what’s inconvenient—the more devastating the aftermath will be.

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The weekend brought reports that the man fired from Florida governor Ron DeSantis’ campaign staff for posting a white supremacist image some time ago now works for Marco Rubio at the State Department. Another man, the former Chief Counsel for Nominations with the Senate Judiciary Committee, spent Sunday spewing racist rhetoric and insulting women’s physical features while saying people who disagreed with him needed to wear muzzles or burqas. He suggested that what he referred to as “bitching minorities” should leave the country.

This are just two of hundreds of examples of how reactionary attitudes and demands of right-wing trolls have been revealed as indistinguishable from those of Republican officials and staffers (many of whom have actually become online trolls, following the example of their president).

And the U.S. is no exception. Not only is there domestic comfort with racist and sexist statements in public that would have led to firings and social exclusion just a few years ago, but professional trolls around the globe often directly incorporate symbols or goals of fascist movements. Anyone who watches what’s happening in the world in the last decade has seen the parallel rise of right-wing candidates and movements, each of which has their own disturbing arc.

Many other countries are facing similarly harrowing developments, most recently Germany’s eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt delivering a plurality victory of the far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in the election held Sunday. Each of these movements is ostensibly about economic conditions, but their power draws primarily from the energy created by generating and sustaining anti-immigrant hatred.

I’ve written several times before about the concentration camp tendency, which precedes the arrival of mass roundups and mass extrajudicial detention in countries. That’s the process by which bad actors portray the economic survival or even the soul of the country as at risk, with the only solution being to exclude whole groups of people residing in the country from part or all of society.

Though their platforms get played as economic concerns, they often include quiet or public advocacy for women to stay at home, or for removing minorities from high positions. Yet at this moment in history, those issues are no longer effective enough in generating enough powerful political resentment on their own. Right now, the heart of the virulent global political backlash relies on anti-immigrant sentiment.

Today I want to talk about the arc of how fascist ideology winds up with popular support, how anti-immigrant disinformation gets created and spread, and what it means about how we can stand up, from an individual basis right up to the national level. These are not easy questions, but there are actual answers. Those answers are sometimes hard, too. And for the most part, they’re not the ones being adopted by leaders in the public sphere.

The next U.S. Space Force uniforms. It’s not hard to recognize what’s happening. (Yes, I know these echo the uniforms from the film Starship Troopers.)

First, I want to address this dynamic of the role of anti-immigrant paranoia as the cornerstone of the growing support that right-wing parties are receiving. Which right-wing parties am I talking about? The ones that generally would reject comparisons to the Nazi Party but which nonetheless welcome Nazis as voters and use Nazi rhetoric, social goals, and even symbolism in their political campaigns and governance.

Spain’s El País had a nice summary of some key lessons to draw from the expanding support for AfD in Germany. One graphic shows that 91% of AfD voters agreed with the statement “I am very concerned that so many strangers live in Germany now.” Economic worries were just behind, followed by “The way of life in Germany is changing too much.”

It’s easy enough to assume without evidence that those things are naturally bound to one another. And right-wing politicians certainly do their level best to try to misrepresent reality and link economic difficulty with the presence of foreigners. But one thing I found while researching my history of concentration camps was that this linkage has to be created and stoked on an ongoing basis for voters to embrace it.

How does that happen? Through both deliberate propaganda and what we might call incidental propaganda.

Deliberate propaganda is put out by outlets controlled by or directly serving authoritarian parties or leaders, or those who aspire to authoritarianism. Facebook was used extensively in Myanmar to sow disinformation and paint the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Myanmar, as sexually violent, unassimilable, and animal-like foreigners. This is a modern example of deliberate propaganda seeded by the government and aided by hate groups.

To ponder the key supporting role played by incidental propaganda, we can look at the post-Brexit study done in 2017 by King’s College London’s Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power. The study found that ahead of the Brexit vote, immigration coverage tripled, surging past economic issues in terms of attention received by news organizations. Four-fifths of the front page stories of immigration in that window were from outlets supporting Brexit. But among the rest, the simple shift of focus by nominally independent publications to the topic that the far-right wanted in the news at key moments like Brexit contributed to incidental propaganda.

Partisan disinformation

Closer to home, it was possible to see the same phenomenon in action when people like Christopher Rufo dragged anti-trans propaganda into American discourse by demanding and generating coverage of what he hoped to use to set the terms of the discussion—or his targeting of Claudine Gay’s research in order to remove her from her post as president of Harvard. These were presented as factual matters, but in truth, they were moral arguments and part of vicious attempts to cast Black women as undeserving of power and trans people as fundamentally unfit for human society.

A study out last month in the journal Social Science Quarterly from a trio of Syracuse University professors looked at links between partisan media exposure, acceptance of anti-immigrant misinformation, and moral judgments of immigrant deservingness of inclusion. The study—by Bixuan Ren, Nalae Hong, and Lars Willnat—examined exposure to traditional news, partisan cable news, and social media. The authors considered how each relates to the acceptance of misinformation, whether immigrants are deserving, and support or opposition to immigration policies.

What they found is that misinformation warps both the understanding of the facts around actual immigration policy and the moral mechanism for evaluating whether immigrants are worthy of inclusion in the country. You can correct the factual record, but if the misinformation dovetails with an underlying warped moral framework, that moral evaluation related to immigration will not change through simple correction of facts.

Interestingly, they also found partisan television still plays a key role in disseminating partisan information. That means that pushing back against propaganda in online spaces alone will not in and of itself be sufficient.

AfD victory

Of course, the U.S. is not Germany, which is not France, which is not England. So I’ll try to be narrow and specific about the argument I’m making here. In terms of regional specificity, for instance, some people have apparently suggested that eastern regions of Germany are to blame for the AfD’s rise, because support for the far-right is stronger in the East, with the implication that those who lived in East Germany during the Cold War have retrograde attitudes or a lingering appreciation of authoritarian rule.

But as historian Ned Richardson-Little wrote, the group that gave AfD the least support—31%—was the voters in Saxony-Anhalt who were over 70. And those are the voters who actually spent not only their childhood but half their lives living in a Stasi state.

As with many other countries, there are some strange dynamics going on in terms of demographics: the region in question lost half a million people since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The turnout was very high on a percentage basis of voters, as El País notes. But the population base that might have resisted the AfD and its propaganda of resentment may well be the ones with better economic options, the ones who left.

It’s also worth noting, because economist Paul Krugman wrote on Monday that unlike the U.S., Germany as a country is still highly industrialized, with the kind of economy that Trump has promised to build for the MAGA crowd. Yet (in part because of Trump’s tariffs, and in part for other reasons) the industrial base is Germany is eroding, with Volkswagen announcing 50,000 layoffs, coming on the heels of another 50,000 currently underway.

Turning back to the U.K., Brexiteers who got their dream—barriers to trade and immigration—sabotaged their own economy tragically over the last decade. The answers that MAGA pretends to be offering, the answers that many in the center and center-left in the U.S. and elsewhere are embracing in search of votes—to get rid of immigrants and to return to a golden era of industrialized production—are not just evil. They are not simple or effective answers at all.

Nostalgia for fascism

What we’re experiencing now is a global wave of nostalgia for a time when the public imagined that fascist tactics—the concentration camp tendency, mass removals, and even widespread detention in camps—might really solve their problems. But we’ve run this historical experiment before.

Many media outlets have been unwilling or unable to recognize the far-right shifts by conservative parties wanting to replay the first half of the prior century in the hopes of cementing power. Yet the paths those governments are taking—the profound persecution of targeted groups, the massive funding and building of detention facilities, the arrests of 50,000 people in the U.S. in July alone, with a prior monthly goal of three times as many—are more than familiar. Even those who are unable to acknowledge it know exactly where all this is leading. They’re just afraid to stand up to these tactics.

If the original twentieth-century cycle of fascism was built on nostalgia for an imaginary past, the twenty-first century version is based on nostalgia for a time when the fascist strategy of punishing minorities and women for every social problem could still be perceived as an innocent approach. The right understands exactly where it’s taking us. But establishment figures—center and center-left politicians among them—pretend that either the right is addressing popular resentments rather than creating them, or that they themselves have no idea where this all leads. But slightly moderated fascist tactics will not get us out of this.

A common history

In 2015, while I was working on the camps book, I went to a conference in Estonia. The title was a question: “Common European memory: Promise, or illusion, or challenge?” Every session was focused on how various EU states did or did not have a shared vision of the idea of Europe, its history, and its future. At the time, national perceptions seemed to be divided in many ways by the postwar experience. Western European countries had resisted then navigated the decline of empire and colonialism, while the Central and Eastern European nations had suffered under Soviet domination. These differences seemed almost insurmountable.

In the end, however, the same authoritarian tactics are being used to sow divisions across Europe—east, center and west. And those who would benefit from tyranny have discovered ever more effective and targeted propaganda in the digital age. As the Syracuse University researchers showed, television, too, has not lost its power.

Meanwhile, oligarchs on every continent are continually looking for ways to fund misinformation and unrest that would allow them to profit further. Even in Germany, where more than half a billion dollars in funding has come directly from the government—which funds political parties there—authorities have brought multiple cases against AfD members over massive illegal donations from billionaires. One judgment against the AfD involving illegally accepting millions of euros was handed down just four months ago.

As historian Thomas Zimmer explained in his post this week, it is a mistake to see these kinds of electoral victories as significant ideological shifts in the population—particularly when they are narrow (as in the U.S.) or fall short of a majority (in Germany, and the U.S. in 2016). That’s just not how voters think. These results do not indicate a massive retrenchment of ideology nationwide. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous.

What we can do

I would argue that those who support democracy in the U.S. are going to have to come up with not only a strategy for November elections, but a larger framework for a long-term approach. For those who truly wish for a democratic country, there can be no permanent seizure of power, because there will always be incumbent backlash.

This means that the system itself has to be reformed. The postwar ideals of asylum for refugees on the international level, and humanity toward immigrants on the national one, were both flawed constructs that often violated their promises. But they offered some commitment to an agreed-upon past and future. Every party and party leader wishing to preserve the possibility of a democratic future in Germany and the U.S. (and elsewhere) will have their own answers and their own language for what needs to happen. But at root, it will require addressing the ongoing corruption of the state via the abuse of scapegoated communities, especially immigrants.

So work locally to establish a coherent and explicit moral framework for the policies you’re pushing. Present a narrative about it. There will be times to bring that narrative to the forefront, and times to focus on specific policies instead. But you have to understand the bigger picture of what’s happening with propaganda and disinformation if you want not only to win elections but to stop ascendant fascism. Work to connect the local frame with a national movement.

To extrapolate the Syracuse University researchers’ findings beyond what they looked at, I would say that you have to offer different immigration policies attached specifically to a different moral framework. You can adjust policies here and there, which might bring limited relief to some communities. But if you don’t create a bigger narrative that reframes the moral assumptions that are so vulnerable to misinformation, you’re not vaccinating your country against the biggest, worst part of what is happening. A band-aid is not going to cure Germany of the threat from the AfD. And it will not save the United States from Trumpism.

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The latest podcast episode focuses on what the pushback over converting warehouses to detention camps has in common with the data center revolt. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

Ground beef from my grocery store in Virginia.

Today, I’ll be brief ahead of the holiday weekend and write about a topic I think of often, though I’m one hundred percent sure no one else does. It comes to mind so frequently that I was sure I’d already written about it at some point during the almost two years that have passed since I started this newsletter. But after rigorous searching, I can say that apparently no existing Degenerate Art post has addressed it. Until today.

Bear with me a moment, because I realize this will sound odd. What I think about often is what I call the question of the five-story hamburger dog. It’s not, as you might imagine, a five-story dog that likes to eat hamburger. Instead, I had the idea at the age of eight or so that it might be possible to build an enormous dog statue out of hamburger. How to do so seemed intimidating to figure out. I realized that the project would include complicated engineering challenges. It would be hard.

A few days after imagining the hamburger dog, it occurred to me that not everything difficult was automatically worth doing. I realized it was possible to pick and choose what to do, and turn down things that were uninteresting or seemed pointless. It was a mild revelation at the time, because I was a pleaser. An enthusiastic child who wanted to leap every obstacle, I probably let too much of my self-worth depend on constantly proving my intelligence or willingness to work. I didn’t want to be ignored or to seem scared to take on the labors of Hercules, should some version of them confront me in my West Virginia town.

So at the time, the hamburger dog served as a reminder that I could choose what to focus on, and pick challenges that were worth my time. Into my thirties, if I heard someone, especially a co-worker, start talking about a project that would involve a lot of work with no clear benefit, I would mentally peg it as a hamburger dog and remind friends or colleagues there might be a better use of all the time involved. Was that really what we wanted to be doing?

But once I got past forty, the hamburger dog became one of those lenticular prints that you can observe from two angles and discover alternating perspectives or even different images. I could still see my original point, but two additional positions emerged.

It struck me that I might not know in advance whether something worthwhile would come out of building the hamburger dog. There could be useful discoveries in the course of the project; the process itself might be valuable in some way I wouldn’t foresee. What if it brought a community together? What if it made some other, more significant achievement possible?

And in the last decade, I’ve begun to think that building the hamburger dog is itself sufficient. Not enough weirdness exists in the world. So much is organized by conventional expectations and demands for added value. Plenty of people analyze the world that way. But we have hardly anyone imagining building five-story dogs out of hamburger. If a strange inspiration seizes hold of you, and you feel passionate about it, my inclination would now be to encourage your eccentric creativity as much as possible.

Let me be clear—I’m not talking about financially or socially valueless projects like using taxpayers’ money to build a giant arch. The hamburger dog cannot be made through demands on others. It can only be made in happy isolation or through joyful collaboration.

Have you always wanted to design and submit a Dungeons & Dragons monster? Go for it! Have you recently realized that you can rent instruments for short periods from music stores? You could bring home a banjo! Or a baritone! Or a bassoon! Who knows what kind of music you could make with that. (For the record, I’m willing to collaborate on a song called “Five-Story Hamburger Dog”—as long as we can make it sound a little like the Fall or Dry Cleaning, because that’s how the phrase sounds in my head.)

In an age of artificial intelligence, I’m beginning to feel almost a reverence for quirkily human concoctions. The more unexpected the better.

So if you have a barbecue this Labor Day weekend or attend one, take a moment to think about your stance vis-à-vis the five-story hamburger dog, and how many patties it would take to build one. I can’t think of anything more pointless, yet worth every second of your time.

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Everywhere you look, it’s not hard to find suffering intentionally inflicted by people who are in charge. As the public looks for protection from persecution by officials, from outbreaks of contagious diseases or illness spawned by uninspected contaminated food, little seems to be on offer from the powerful in the way of relief.

We might have hoped that Congress would look out for its constituents—or that even if Republicans refused to do so, Democrats might. We might have hoped that businesses relying on human consumers would have their best interests at heart. Or that universities would stand against government censorship—or at least, as the institutions most dedicated to and financially reliant on the principle of the unique value of human knowledge, that they might defend that idea.

And certainly, there have been individual politicians, companies, and universities that have stood against the administration and the current crop of oligarchs. But for the most part, the people who had the most power and leverage haven’t been standing up for these ideals or the public interest.

Instead, members of Congress and senators alike allocated hundreds of billions of dollars to easing the tax burden of billionaires and multimillionaires who already control so much in our daily lives, while funding a massive concentration camp complex intended to harm millions of our neighbors. They passed legislation to cut healthcare spending in ways deliberately scheduled to cripple the Medicaid system after the November elections this year.

In 2025, many who hadn’t been paying attention during his first term were startled by the harm that Trump was willing and able to inflict on everyday people in the interest of his pet projects—his ballroom, tariffs, being friends with dictators, a willingness to unleash the U.S. military for personal grudges or crusades, and above all, his mission to use the federal government for any purpose he chooses.

Today, I’ll write about the public reaction to data centers and the construction of concentration camps around the country. An initial pushback on converting warehouses to detention camps has been followed by a popular revolt against data centers. So let’s look at what it means when those in power see regular people pushing back, and what these movements might signal about the future.

One of the many data centers under construction in Gainesville, VA, during 2025.

All about control

With his dizzying, malicious antics, the president is trying to exercise complete control over federal power. What does that look like in terms of governance? It means Trump declares whatever he wants to be true as truth—and countless other people in charge of agencies or organizations go along with it.

If he declares the Strait of Hormuz—the symbol of his embarrassing and illegal war against Iran—to be American territory, his allies in government go along with it, so as not to face punishment. When the president renamed Lake Ontario as Lake America amid a pathetic trade war he created with Canada for no reason, Google Maps caved to his will on this pointless, false, and inflammatory action against a key democracy now under threat from the president of the United States.

The federal government has also been pulling grants for what it refers to “DEI bike lanes,” as well as calling for their removal. It’s as if Trump is a three-year-old terminal cancer patient whose every whim the entire government is indulging out of a wish to coddle him, while pretending whatever he says is real. It would be merely pathetic, if it didn’t have real-life consequences.

For anyone who might be inclined to say, “So what if he declares Lake Ontario to be Lake America? Who cares?” I would say that this willingness to call unreal things real and treat them as if they are real is a way to let bad people assert control—and not just over naming.

Last month, Pennsylvania reported its first deaths from measles in more than three decades. The administration erasing those deaths from the official record would be no more arbitrary or real than renaming Lake Ontario. But these decisions have real effects in the world: misleading the public, harming public health, and corrupting government agencies.

The point applies in its own way to tech and finance billionaires who try to impose their own warped, self-serving beliefs as fact in other settings. This was made clear in recent days by Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase. Eight years ago, Armstrong made a public promise to eventually give away at least half of his net worth to deserving charities. But now, he’s explained why he shut down his foundation in 2023, saying that philanthropy was generally a net negative for the world. He specified that he didn’t like losing control of the money and what it was used for, suggesting that Henry Ford would turn over in his grave if he only knew what the Ford Foundation was up to since his demise.

And on that last point, he may be correct, as reasonable people can only hope that Henry Ford’s own work toward his ideal society, which consisted of spreading virulent anti-Semitism globally for decades, is no longer being supported by his eponymous foundation. But the very comparison Armstrong makes puts him in the position of agreeing with Ford’s reactionary extremism.

His argument also highlights something apparent about both Trump and the billionaire class of tech, finance, and media moguls. For them, it’s not enough to influence global systems, affect the lives of millions, or make riches far beyond what they could spend on any luxuries they might want. These people want to control humanity itself.

Billionaires tend to portray themselves as humanity’s saviors. But if their expanding power requires blighting communities—as Elon Musk has done in Memphis with noise and emissions pollution—they are more than willing to inflict suffering on others without taking any responsibility for the harm.

Blaming woke

The roots of concentration camp societies rise from the circumstances by which already powerful people try to convince the public to give them even more power to harm vulnerable people. Which is why it’s so strange to look at what’s happening now, in relation to the modest accommodations that advocates of social justice pressed for in recent decades. Is sending small children unaccompanied to unstable countries, or arresting adults to be tortured in detention in the U.S. or abroad, or shooting citizens and non-citizens alike in the street really comparable to being forced to attend an occasional human resources training or being made aware of the effects of what you say in daily life?

One of the most common things is to hear that “woke went too far.” The CEOs and tech giants seem to think that the powerful should not be impacted at all by even minor inconveniences—as if diversity and immigrants didn’t build their industries and a better country.

And that message found resonance with those who already felt a lack of control in their own lives. The CEOs and the public weren’t actually mad about the same things. But the wealthy funded a political reactionary movement that has managed to conflate the two, all to their advantage.

And if the general public didn’t start out mad about the same thing as the CEOs, they wound up swallowing the lies that were fed to them. They bought everything from the myth that brown and black people in the U.S. and immigrants across the board were somehow harming vulnerable white communities to the delusion that the smallest accommodations for trans people would lead to civilizational collapse.

But the promise of social improvement through persecuting one’s neighbors turns out to be an empty one. Punishing trans people and abusing immigrants hasn’t helped the economy at all. Many voters and nonvoters alike are still angry about their own lack of control over their own lives, and Trump and his fellow billionaires have made the situation worse. So the rage is now coming out in other ways.

The upside of public revolt

David Wallace-Wells noted in an opinion piece yesterday that data center opposition spans the political spectrum, with three in four Americans opposing the idea of one being built in their community. A majority of Republicans agreed.

Part of what this data center opinion shift shows is that you can only keep things aloft in an abstract, unreal way or so long. Bad actors can throw your neighbors into demonized categories and generate fear that some people will tack their anxieties onto. And those who have been deluded will make wild projections—as if the persecuted are somehow the attackers. (Witness the guy in Roanoke who told the Washington Post last week that he thinks the Democratic candidate in his district is correct about diagnosing the problems facing his community, he will not vote for her, because he is too worried about the danger that trans people represent. “I got granddaughters,” he told the reporter.)

But when the abstract and imaginary bits fall away, it’s harder to fool people. Data Centers are often loud. They are power hogs, raising costs for surrounding communities. Many data centers and detention camps alike have been authorized by local authorities without ever seeking public input, let along telling anyone the deal is underway—until it’s too late. Some backroom deals have been sneakier, excluding even local officials.

The modern political sphere is made up of so much talking about an idea and being for or against it in ways that are detached entirely from the real world. But detention facilities and data centers involve actual construction and physical spaces, tangible things that can be comprehended and refused. We’re now seeing a potentially more productive rejection of the larger, abstract false bill of goods: a massive public reaction against data centers.

In politics, you have to seize opportunities and make your own, too. Each time people push back, it reminds them that politics isn’t just something that gets done to them. It’s something they can do, too.

The downside

Yet there are risks to the revolt against data centers. Massive public resistance to something rarely leaves room for subtlety. In my opinion, resistance needs to be fused with education efforts and a positive path toward changing the situation and addressing the underlying needs of the community. Without a coherent path forward, any anti-data center movement may well fall victim to opportunistic rage-baiting that directs harm at scapegoated communities in the long run. Any large social reaction can itself become reactionary in dangerous ways.

Given that the revolt is bipartisan for now, the current anti-data center movement could fuse with anti-immigrant sentiment stoked by the right to become a broader populist, isolationist know-nothing movement, spreading far beyond the seed corn planted by Trumpists over the last decade. It could solidify anti-government sentiment and paranoia even after Trump is gone.

A larger social safety net and more effective governance could address so many of the ills of and needs for basic subsistence facing people right now. But not if people reject the idea and role of government entirely.

Already entrenched

Part of the broad sweep of politicians looking to enshrine an ideology of hatred and persecution of immigrants—as well as companies looking to inject AI into every aspect of existence—is to permeate communities and daily life so completely that it will be impossible to remove them. Sam Altman declared a goal of turning human intelligence into a utility that people can buy from his company on a meter. These guys are well aware how valuable it is if we become economically or otherwise dependent on them.

This is part of why it was critical to respond early to the attempt to transform existing warehouse space into concentration camps for immigrant detention. Towns becoming dependent on detention facilities already has a dangerous track record in the U.S. Stopping these big shifts before they become a done deal or can work their money and relationships into communities nationwide is critical.

Big public reactions also tend to be ephemeral. We have to act on them quickly. And even after gains are made, we have to continue to pay attention. The warehouse movement stalled the government drive to create concentration camps from existing warehouses in the first half of this year. But despite a shift to other methods in the bigger picture, Project Salt Box reported that what the government had claimed was a defunct approach to funding detention facilities just awarded $17.3 million to a private contractor to convert a facility in San Antonio to meet ICE’s needs. These efforts will not really stop until those involved are removed from power and held accountable.

Even more than massive ICE funding, the investment into AI companies and data centers is fueling the remaining stability of the U.S. economy. The AI industry has already made our national economy dependent on them in ways that appear to be unsustainable. There are good reasons to doubt both their stated good intentions and their projections about future profitability. And if even if the latter were somehow accurate, very questions remain about any company having such outsized influence.

States and merchants

Historian William Dalrymple wrote an opinion piece last week about a similar conundrum, laying out in detail what it took for the House of Lords to dismantle the British East India Company. He wrote about how the Company’s governor general of Bengal faced impeachment, with Edmund Burke in the role of prosecutor. Burke claimed that the company was a “state in the disguise of a merchant” and needed to be reined in.

I would argue that our tech giants are likewise coming in seeking and exerting the kind of power that people have historically surrendered only to governments. But these companies are uninterested in the accountability that citizens of democracies have come to expect from governments.

And just as dangerous is our current president, whose conduct in office is what we might call “a merchant in the disguise of a state.” He’s treating the federal government like his private corporation, to pillage and benefit from at will.

We need limits on corporate power and individual wealth as well as accountability from our elected officials. Is it any wonder there’s a wholesale loathing of government and data centers by so many?

If you feel powerless, experiencing the solidarity of massive data-center resistance can be a heady thing, as people come to realize that it’s possible to control some part of their lives. But in my opinion, the key response has to be to embrace the public reaction and give it a direction that leads to more political engagement and more power devolved to the people, rather than oligarchs and aspiring dictators. The road we’re currently on can lead only to greater abuses of power.

What can be done

The momentum from both sides of the aisle against data centers (and occasionally even bipartisan rejection of detention camps in one’s own backyard) is a sign that anti-corruption measures are something politicians can run on.

Corruption is when someone is siphoning money or privileges out of a process unlawfully or unethically, trading their position for personal gain. With data centers, people can see they’re being cheated, and their quality of life affected. But fury doesn’t automatically lead to change or better governance. The fury is just a starting point, a first step toward a political platform.

A parallel push could reveal how the massive ICE budget is cheating the public, too—along with the slashing of the health care budgets, and the war that is eating our tax dollars while our military kills schoolchildren overseas. As I’ve mentioned before, all roads aimed at fixing our current crisis in some definitive way seem to lead to an anti-corruption campaign against the politicians and billionaires who are stealing our resources, public goods, and money.

But we need candidates and a party willing to offer a coherent vision of what ethical and effective governance would bring. Otherwise the reaction to data centers can just as easily be cultivated to foster further corruption and division in our communities.

We have an opportunity to use the moment to shift the political dynamics on the ground, creating ongoing accountability through community awareness, engagement, and oversight. The reaction against data centers is a start, but in and of itself isn’t a vision that can save us. It may be forcing a recognition that everyday people can insist on some say in what happens—but where we go from here is entirely up for grabs.

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In the latest podcast episode, I talked about not letting the complexity of the political challenge before us get in the way of the moral clarity of our moment. There's no need to compromise with people who support the current terror. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

A screenshot from my conversation with Asha Rangappa on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, the very sharp Asha Rangappa was kind enough to talk to me for her book club—a.k.a. The Freedom Academy. Ostensibly, we were talking about One Long Night, my global history of concentration camps. But of course the reason we were talking about it was because of events from the last decade in the United States, and how clearly the country is currently following the arc of previous concentration camp regimes.

At one point, I mentioned that the book arrived in the world in 2017 and went mostly unnoticed until the following year, when Trump’s family separation policy became the public face of a larger push toward stigmatizing and punishing immigrants. She said something along the lines of hoping that people understood the book’s relevance after that.

I told her that yes, people did, but not necessarily in the way I’d expected. In the last half of Trump’s first term, I got a number of requests to do interviews on national television. The book didn’t sell more, but dozens of magazines and newspapers requested that I write something for them about the administration’s horrifying tactics and what light history might shed on the moment. It was those pieces that seemed to start a real conversation.

In the second Trump administration, I’ve heard less frequently from news outlets seeking opinion pieces on the detention system Republicans have thrown tens of billions of dollars at. But I’ve heard so often from people who’ve read my writing online and are more familiar with the ideas from my book than they are with the printed book itself. I constantly get asked to help with local education projects, to give advice on books others are writing, or to address current events around ICE detention and the collapse of democracy in the United States.

I’m grateful that the history and concepts in my book are turning out to be useful for organizers on the ground, giving them a global framework to be able to talk publicly about the terror that’s been unleashed in ways both new and familiar in the U.S. One of the things I told Asha on Wednesday was that as I was in the middle of it, I never for a moment doubted that a history of concentration camps would be the most important book I would ever write. (In fact, the weight of its importance was so clear to me, long before Trump even announced his candidacy for president mid-2015, that I sometimes felt almost paralyzed by the responsibility of writing it.)

***

All this reminded me of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a nonfiction book about an African American woman whose cells were taken and used in research without her family’s knowledge. As many of you already know, those cells have since played a role in countless breakthroughs and cures.

I interviewed Skloot about her book in 2010, a few months after it came out, neither of us realizing at that point quite how big it would become. After our conversation, she sent me a photo of the system of index cards she’d used to break down narratives in other stories and plot the complicated structure of her book. They covered the surface of her bed entirely.

This will probably sound strange, but over the years I have, at times, felt a little bad for Skloot. She wrote a blockbuster book that was made into a movie, and addressed an issue of longstanding ethical and scientific importance—which is more than most of us will ever accomplish. The book was so big, however, that it became its own industry, with years on the bestseller list, additional talks to be given, and ongoing relevance that had to be addressed. I occasionally wondered whether she had another book she wanted to write but perhaps couldn’t, because the ongoing importance of the mission animating the first one meant there was no remaining bandwidth for another.

It was only in the last year or so that I realized that Skloot definitely didn’t need my pity. After the return of Trump, it struck me that I’d wound up writing a book that turned out to be historically relevant, too. The ideas from it seemed to have been useful to people seeking to understand the pain of those vulnerable to institutional or governmental abuse—past and present. Long after Skloot’s book appeared, I’d written an account that had made it necessary to speak and write about critical issues involved year after year in the wake of its publication. The ideas in the book had turned out to be meaningful. But the book itself had been largely ignored.

Don’t feel sorry for me, though! I’ve had other adventures and gotten to write other books that got more attention, and I’m beyond grateful for the opportunities I’ve had. And for the last two years, this newsletter has been a way to share directly with readers the ways in which history is repeating. Given the chaos and instability of the current era, I’m grateful to know what to do to help.

***

Earlier today, I posted on Bluesky that “you can't call the moment when the tide will turn, but their hopes and legacy will fall to nothing in the end, because ruin is all they are capable of.” That’s another understanding that comes from having looked at the long view of concentration camps and their history. Whether through war, invasion, popular resistance, or simple collapse, this model of oppression rarely continues indefinitely (looking at you, North Korea—but I would say that it’s the exception that proves the example for too many reasons to include in this post).

Those in charge today have done so much harm. People are already looking at gargantuan efforts to repair the damage. Three former Centers for Disease Control employees who resigned in 2025 proposed the broad outlines a plan today for securing public health in the United States. They prioritized shielding science from political agendas and administering funding as directed by Congress, among other things, giving specific examples of the dysfunction underway at present.

There will be more death and ruin before we can make things right. And when it comes to fixing the world, it’s often helpful to be strategic, like the former CDC employees—or like Skloot in planning her story. Take one issue and break it down into manageable pieces. Find one problem you know how to solve, one thing you want to exist in the world after all this is over.

You can’t fix the whole crisis, but you can take up a single cause, and find some aspect of it for which you have enough skills, qualifications, time, or resources to make a difference. If you really don’t feel you have anything to offer, then look to organizations that will begin to train you for a role that would matter to you. Let what you care about set the path you take. It’s a gift when you know what matters to you, because that is your best guide to what you can be doing right now—today.

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Midterm elections will take place in the U.S. on Tuesday, November 3—just ten weeks from today. And meanwhile, in news that will shock no one, the most destabilizing threat to a free and democratic American society is the president and his allies who are running the federal government.

Between now and November, you’re going to hear a lot about the need to moderate and to compromise to fight the threat of Trumpism. Thinking strategically about how to block the agenda of the goons in charge at present is a complicated question. But as a starting point, it’s critical not to let complexity of this task blind you to the political landscape before us, which is much simpler.

Put it on your calendar! A message from the Illinois State Board of Elections.

Let me reference just a few news items from the last week or so. With 50% tariffs imposed on some Canadian goods, Trump is launching a senseless trade war with Canada, a stalwart ally and dependable neighbor. Two more people were killed in illegal strikes in the Caribbean by the U.S. military this week, just the latest fatalities in a death toll now in the hundreds.

And in one of the strangest stories from the second Trump administration—though the story began years ago—we learned that the fanatically devoted, politically reactionary and religious extremist executive assistant Natalie Harp helps to shape the president’s understanding of the world and access to its most extreme corners. She also apparently writes disturbing letters of self-abnegation, and goes sprinting after golf carts or climbing into car trunks to accompany Trump when he goes anywhere outside the White House.

The Harp issue was brought into sharp relief earlier this month by Senator Jon Ossoff. His comments triggered a furious response from Trump allies, which sparked widespread coverage.

I’m old enough to remember that decades ago, it was common to see a candidate for state legislature proposing some wild measure, saying something openly racist or recommending executing women who get abortions. The press would cover it the way they covered exotic customs in faraway countries, and everyone would be horrified and titillated. But the general vibe seemed to be that you shouldn’t worry too much about that guy who hated black people or wanted to kill women, because he was on the fringe and would never really hold power.

Now someone (actually a few someones) with the mindset of that hateful, ignorant fringe candidate is now running the United States day in and day out. Today, I want to consider exactly where we’re at, given that state of affairs. I’ll also make the argument that we shouldn’t compromise on holding fast against delusions and hate. We shouldn’t give in to the corruption that is expanding so rapidly all around us.

I’ll look at the difference between reaching and motivating voters whose concerns you address on the one hand, and getting suckered into supporting atrocities and hate propaganda on the other. Because they’re two different things.

Bad tsar, bad boyars

There’s a cliche about governance in which people want to believe (and are sometimes encouraged to believe) that the king or the dear leader has their best interests at heart, but the bad lords and councilors around him are keeping him from knowing what is really happening in the country. The idea is that the leader would somehow step in to protect them if only he knew.

Some Trump supporters may still believe this, but their leader is a bucket filled with resentments and a howling need for affirmation, and little else. The cabinet secretaries scheming to influence him are also bad. And now we see media focus illuminate another source of malign influence—Natalie Harp.

She’s been written about for years already without ever really getting a spotlight before. Harp cheered on the January 6, 2021, coup mightily. And she’s part of an evangelical American movement that has wrought so much harm on the country. Call her Rasputin, or maybe Wormtongue. In any case, she reveres him, and represents a key constituency of the batshit portion of our society that elected him. Harp seems to think her job is to abase herself to the president, while simultaneously acting as a conduit with foreign leaders in private messages—all while her salary is paid by the public.

As Maggie Haberman said in an interview this week, “What Natalie Harp is, is a living, breathing exclamation point of how different, radically different this second [Trump] term is from term one. As much as it might have looked like there was somebody like Natalie Harp last time, existing in the government as an official in the Oval Office, there really was not. This is just so different. And it is the degree to which his belief of what is happening and this unreality bubble that he exists in has been created and sustained.”

Harp is far from the only bottom-feeder who has glommed onto Trumpism and its effects, though others are less focused on propping up Trump than on pushing the same retrograde ideas. The reversal of DEI policies and return to open bigotry that have harmed so many Black women in the job market and decimated American education have been cheered on by pseudo-intellectuals who are deeply racist and committed to eugenics as a field.

A similar racism animates the anti-immigrant purges terrorizing millions in the U.S. today. Much of the same crew also loathes women deeply and denies our physical and intellectual capacities. And trans people have been targeted in particularly virulent ways by right-wing podcasters and the president alike. Each of these kinds of hatred has been used to help return Trump to office, and with him there, the true believers and the cynics alike are destroying any remaining commitment to democracy and equality.

The success of this agenda during the first half of Trump’s second administration isn’t entirely a result of propaganda convincing passive listeners. In some cases, the hatemongers find very willing takers for the bill of goods they’re selling. I know this is true because I grew up among people who believed the same things that Natalie Harp believes, the same things that Richard Hanania believes.

I know what kind of world these people want to make. Trump doesn’t have the same desire to shape the world the true hatemongers do, with a specific structure in mind, but he has the same desire for absolute control. And the racists, the bad advisers, the misogynists, and egomaniacal tech or political leaders they prop up—none of these are people we should compromise with ideologically.

Punishment outside the U.S.

The damage underway is in no way limited to suffering inside U.S. borders. We should be equally opposed to the international politics the United States has embraced under Trump 2.0. The cuts to USAID have continued their genocidal harm, aimed at poor people of color worldwide.

As mentioned, the U.S. military, in our name, continues to kill random people at sea. We’ve also seen our armed forces acting domestically, in the form of National Guard troops abusing civilians. Still, the administration has been much quicker to use the military for illegal actions abroad: in these boat strikes, the war against Iran, and the many other bombing operations undertaken in the last year and a half.

This is of a piece with Trump’s open hostility toward our traditional allies, including countries like Denmark and Canada. As a result, his actions might come across as so shocking that they appear to be a complete rupture with prior presidents and U.S. policy. But unlike the threats against NATO allies, the larger campaign of boat bombings and military operations are actually part of a long-running continuum.

It can be argued that the boat bombings are the next step in hostilities beyond the drone strikes carried out under Barack Obama and Joe Biden. George W. Bush created offshore concentration camps, kidnapping, and torture sites in Guantanamo and elsewhere with the War on Terror, and Donald Trump has embraced all of it.

The invocation of the War on Drugs under Nixon from more than half a century ago continues to provide the basis, if dishonestly, for the boat strikes during Trump 2.0. It can seem like Trump is doing shocking things out of nowhere—and it is important to realize this administration is making every U.S. crisis significantly worse. Yet at the same time, many of the cruelties and abuses they’re inflicting are just the next phase in a specific arc of extrajudicial actions unfolding over the last quarter-century, and going even further back.

Several of those policies came about with the help of people who saw themselves as progressives compromising on moral values in ways that were seen as practical at the time. The problem is that when you surrender the moral values that create your politics, you move closer to your opponents, but they will never move closer to you. And like corruption taking over in an economy, once a society rationalizes away its moral frameworks, it can be very hard to undo.

The visions of monsters

Many of the great monsters of history started out with some shred of idealism, even if they quickly surrendered their humanity in order to slaughter their enemies and keep or expand power. But it’s important to realize that Trump has never been for anyone but himself. So even lip service to democracy or higher ideals in any meaningful sense has gone completely out the window now.

The Republican Party has surrendered entirely whatever moral arguments it tried to make in the past, and stands for none of the ideals it once purported to. When Darline Nordone—sister of the deceased Senator Lindsey Graham and the person currently appointed to his seat—muffed a question about Taiwan on a talk show a few days ago, she embarrassed herself.

But when called to account, she didn’t address the issue at hand. Instead, she assured the public that the voters of South Carolina are more concerned about stopping trans children from playing sports than they are questions of international democracy.

The reason that we’re seeing such loud calls for Democrats and leftists to compromise on their moral frameworks is because Trump has been so effective at using hatred to motivate people. He’s managed to get tens of millions to identify with him, some of them very deeply.

But many others among his voters are not people who attend to politics or who follow the nuances of legislation. Because of catchy phrases, manipulation of historic hatreds, or appeals to resentment, these voters have developed an affinity for a particular candidate or for a platform plank.

But the key is not to give in. It’s to stand on reality and democratic values and remind people that they know better, too, that not only can they demand more from their politicians, they themselves—and the country as a whole—can become more than the hatred and punishment that the Trump administration is using to divide us.

Mainstreaming creeps

We’re seeing people tied to deeply racist writing and statements in the past now given prime real estate to replicate them regularly online. This kind of person can write opinion pieces for the New York Times or have a column in the Boston Globe.

Even less hateful people will suggest that rights for trans people as human beings are negotiable, or that immigrants deserve some in-between amount of the terror that has been unleashed against them, or that rounding all these camps up and putting them in camps without due process would be acceptable, if only the facilities were run slightly more humanely. They will talk about immigrants as threats instead of as the foundation of the best parts of modern America.

Meanwhile, people who have found useful applications of AI as a tool sell the concept on huge platforms, trashing people who are alarmed. There seems to be little or no acknowledgment that the corporate leaders of the AI revolution are corrupt or dodgy and don’t have the best interests of the public at heart—pushing their products in ways that are untruthful, dangerous, and damaging to vulnerable individuals, not to mention whole sectors of the economy, from artists to schoolchildren.

Individuals tend to see only their own interests, but we need to think bigger than that. And people don’t have the skills or the time to research all of it themselves on every front. If we create a possible politics for a moral society, a lot of people are ready to join it.

So when you hear the big-tent arguments, don’t think of surrendering on the issues that matter to you. Keep in mind something Hamilton Nolan posted over the weekend about a completely different issue in politics and media coverage: “Is it better to have good politics, or bad politics? Good politics. And do we just want ourselves to have good politics, or do we want everyone to share those good politics? We want everyone to have them. Yes. So if someone is insulting anyone for having good politics, that is very stupid.”

It’s okay to hold on to your good politics and market them smartly, in ways that will appeal to people and bring new voters to your coalition. And I would add that if someone suggests that you can’t win with good politics but should have bad politics because that might be more popular, the opportunism of the statement is obvious to everyone, even the people whose votes you imagine you’ll win. Yet that’s what we’re being told with regard to immigrants, to trans people, and abortion.

But in reality, the idea that embracing Republicans’ bad politics is a more practical approach isn’t even true. People are often more attached to the messaging that’s used than the policy it’s wrapped around. It’s part of a package about what kind of American to be.

And the truth is that the agenda itself—as well as the president—is deeply unpopular. Embracing that agenda is a path to ruin. You’re going to have to put forward some other package about what kind of American to be. It might as well be a good and honorable one.

What you stand for vs. what you run on

And if people say, well, liberals are annoying, and they occasionally feel exhausted by endless head games over language or intentionality, fair enough—that happens sometimes. But it’s important to note that the left is not in power. The Republicans only pretend Woke 1.0 was oppressive and omnipotent; they only claim Joe Biden is responsible for everything Americans don’t like. The elected and appointed officials in power now are responsible for what’s happening now.

I’ve talked before about diagnosing a problem versus figuring out the solution for it. The study of public health reveals those are often two different tracks. You have to know what’s wrong before you can consider how to fix it. But how to fix the country is in part a communications issue.

Going back to the medical example, seeing the problem through the eyes of patients doesn’t mean giving up on the idea of vaccines or preventive care. It means finding ways to reach the public with healthcare or policy solutions you have some rational basis for thinking will help.

In politics, you might decide that it’s better to focus your main message on corruption, because as a communications strategy that more readily draws voters to your side. But even if the voters weren’t interested in cleaning up corruption, the logical next step would not be to become pro-corruption in order to draw those voters.

They will not stop

What I know is that for the people in power today, and for the people who seriously want the same things for the country, it will never be enough to get the world they want. They have to be able to punish their opponents at will, whenever and however they like. That is the essence of Trumpism, and of the house I grew up in.

So if you are a politician, divide the political challenges into two categories: First, what is your moral vision and the policies that flow out of it? Second, what are your most effective issues with the voters you want to reach and what are the most effective ways to talk about them?

Those of us who aren’t politicians can use the same approach in a less formal way to deal with friends and relatives, or politicians in our towns, or on our school or library boards—or anyone we hope to get to adopt a more honest and fair country than the plague of vileness and decay we’re swimming through today. Meeting others where they’re at doesn’t mean embracing their intolerance and resentments. It just means knowing what you stand for, and finding some part of that they might care about.

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In the latest podcast episode, I discuss how the mundane tasks of providing Flock surveillance cameras, electroshock gloves for use on civilians, and ankle monitors for refugees reveal that the U.S. is in the middle stages of concentration camp regime consolidation—and what that means. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

An immigration officer in Falls Church, Virginia, threatens a driver by pointing a gun directly at her on August 10, 2026.

I live in Falls Church, Virginia, a town of just over 15,000 people less than five miles from Washington, D.C., as the crow flies. On Monday, August 10 of this year, a woman named Carolina Molina was in her car in a Falls Church parking lot, in a busy area known as Bailey’s Crossroads—an area I drive to or through several times a week—when she spotted ICE officers.

A licensed counselor who works with immigrants, Molina shouted out her window, calling one of the officers a “ho.” She says she then realized there were other unmarked ICE vehicles in the lot, and pulled into a parking space to turn around and leave. As she did so, she called out more insults. She quickly found herself blocked in by ICE vehicles.

One officer present was recently confirmed by Migrant Insider (via DHS) to be Martin Lagunas. In video of the incident, Lagunas emerged from his vehicle, gun drawn, before standing at Molina’s open window and pointing his weapon at her.

She did not appear intimidated at the time in the video, despite the officer announcing that “you almost ran us over.” She told him he was “full of shit.” When he threatened to arrest her, she said, “I’m a legal citizen.” The officer said, “I don’t care,” as another agent added, “We have the power.” After she announced that she had dashcam footage (in addition to the video she was recording of the conversation on her cell phone), they quickly went back to their vehicles, and she was able to leave the lot. The exchange took less than a minute.

Molina mentioned that it was only later she realized that she’d been in serious danger, and that “this was a whole Renée Good situation again,” referring to the mother shot dead in her car by ICE in Minneapolis in January. In that case, agents had also claimed spuriously that Good was trying to run them over.

I wrote on Tuesday about how patterns of history seem to suggest that the tactics of violent agents working for concentration camp regimes spread like the techniques of an artisanal craft, practitioner to practitioner. Abuses emerging locally then get carried by individuals to other sites, where they are adopted. This Falls Church case with Molina is an interesting lens through which to think about that idea.

In addition to DHS confirmation, several outlets and organizations have also identified Lagunas as the officer who pointed the gun at Molina’s face. Unraveled Press’s identification was based in part upon a very distinctive and large tattoo on his left forearm that matches that of Lagunas—who already has a whole bank of video footage of ICE observers who have logged his interactions elsewhere.

Lagunas been in several key locations and encounters where witnesses have reported dangerous or violent behavior. He and his coworkers have been recorded not just in Minneapolis, where Good was shot, but also in Chicago. He led a team in the latter city, abducting people who showed up for their court hearings. In one video on the street, he and a partner smashed the windows of a car to remove ICE observers inside. Other incidents over the last year—involving undocumented people and citizens alike—have been alarming enough that Lagunas been the focus of prior news stories, long before drawing his gun on a therapist in Falls Church this month.

Here is a man who has carried the tactics of ICE’s roughshod work and willingness to threaten anyone who expresses a dislike for them around the country. And we see the very similar approaches by his colleagues in Chicago, then in Minneapolis, and now in my backyard. We can track the tactics and how they spread. It’s happening in your backyard, too—though perhaps you’ve been protected from seeing it so far.

Two days ago my congressman, Don Beyer, and two other representatives from the state of Virginia met with Carolina Molina on Capitol Hill. At the news conference that followed, they called for an FBI investigation of the incident and demanded access to the bodycam video recorded by the ICE officers. They submitted a letter signed by the trio, as well as three ranking members of key Congressional committees, formally echoing their demands.

And they noted that Molina is far from alone. They listed at least four others who have had similar encounters in Northern Virginia during the two weeks prior to the Auust 10 incident targeting Molina.

And on Wednesday, Pablo Manriquez at Migrant Insider reported Beyer bringing another case forward, that of José Mejía Hernandez in Arlington, Virginia, who was on his way to a bus stop. Men appeared in vehicles and jumped out to grab him. He ran. After he was shot with a stun gun, he lost consciousness and came to in the hospital with a brain bleed and facial bruising.

It’s a good reminder that the vigilante approach to “law enforcement” and the torturers’ club will stay active and share tactics for as long as we let them. They rely on being protected from accountability for their abuses by those in charge. But we don’t have to make it easy for crimes to go unpunished.

People like Carolina Molina have been speaking up, sometimes at serious risk to their safety. (After the incident, DHS claimed that she “attempted to harm officers by weaponizing her vehicle” and suggested charges might still be brought against her.) Elected officials like Reps. Beyer and others on the Hill are using the levers of power that they have to demand answers and consequences. In addition to body camera footage, they’re demanding agent names and disciplinary records, as well as threatening investigations if and when Democrats return to the majority.

This isn’t just an issue for others to take care of on our behalf. It’s also up to us to know what harm is being done to our neighbors where we live. Only the cases with dramatic footage where someone takes the chance to come forward make the news. But we can find out about the other cases and help make them news. We can interrupt the annihilation of public safety and break up the torturers’ club.

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Concentration camps arrive by different routes. In some cases, leaders of a military coup rely on immediate and broad crackdowns. In others, elected officials slowly make certain categories of human beings illegal in the country before resorting to vast roundups. Yet pretty much across the board, these societies have a few key aspects in common.

I’ve talked before about the concentration camp tendency being a process, and that many events have to take place in a country long before camps open. What happens in the middle of that process has predictable patterns, too.

In each case, whatever the existing legal system is gets worse as it warps and buckles under the pressure of extrajudicial processes and detention that become the dominant mode in the country. Another shift occurring in the middle is that the rising extralegal police state entrenches itself. Even if the country had police-state aspects well before its camps era began, those aspects will expand and institutionalize in ways both familiar and new, taking on new powers and using violence in places or against people that might have been exempt before.

In an actual concentration camp regime, the machinery of abduction and detention at some point develops a large enough bureaucracy and budget that it no longer relies on the energy of the malice of individuals at the top who had to move mountains in order to create it. While that malice can certainly be applied in new ways to make the system worse going forward, in the middle stages, the system coalesces to have its own grim institutional momentum, and becomes less reliant on the support of individual champions.

The United States is now solidly in that middle state and moving closer to the back end of the span of time in which we can shut down this process. Today, I want to look at Flock cameras and electric-shock gloves. I want to look at a airline contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars that may well have a sidecar of international detention facilities folded into its details. I want to sit a moment with what it actually means to impose a policy of ankle monitors on Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio.

I’ll address how the police state in the U.S. is metastasizing and institutionalizing in ways that we can act against now but which will become harder and harder to uproot if they aren’t institutionally constrained soon. I’ll give some historical and specific examples of how these processes evolve locally and internationally. And I’ll take a little time to ponder what might be effective resistance.

To start off, let’s look briefly at two very different mid-process historical cases from international developments in concentration-camp detention. Because most Americans know only about Nazi and Russian camp systems, I’ll choose two examples from the Americas, both of which have ties to the United States.

The Oliver Brothers syndrome

The first historical footnote worth exploring is the mass production in Pittsburgh production of barbed wire by Oliver Brothers in the 1890s. As you may recall from prior posts on here, many—but not all—historians consider the first example of modern concentration camps to have taken place in Cuba in the late nineteenth century.

At that time, Spain was trying to put down a rebellion by Cubans in Cuba—a drive for independence the empire had failed to put an end to across decades. In 1896, during a guerrilla war, the man leading the Spanish military on the island, General Valeriano Weyler, decreed the civilians in several contested regions had to evacuate their homes and move behind barbed wire into fortified towns and cities.

Little to no accommodations were made available in those towns. There was even less planning or capacity for providing the extra food that would be required to feed new residents. There was also no opportunity to leave, as barbed wire had been used to divide the country and to not only keep the rebels out, but also to keep the peasants who had been forcibly relocated trapped where they were.

Dividing up the country into multiple sectors via barbed-wire reinforced routes and barbed-wire reinforced towns, as you might imagine, takes a lot of metal. You might ask yourself where on the island of Cuba, in an agricultural economy on terrain paralyzed by war and resources in short supply, the Spanish Empire could come up with so much barbed wire? The answer? In the United States. The enormous corporate empire run by the Oliver Brothers produced barbed wire for Spain in Pittsburgh.

In early 1897, Oliver Brothers shipped out two million pounds of barbed wire to help Spain defeat the rebels. The day they shipped it, the U.S. was only fourteen months from declaring war on Spain. William McKinley, the president of the United States, was less than ten months from declaring reconcentración—this policy of mass forced relocation behind barbed wire—to be horrific. Describing the Spanish government’s atrocities, he said of Spanish tactics, “it was not civilized warfare. It was extermination.”

How did a U.S. company come to supply the means by which to carry out reconcentración in the middle of the war, just months before that same policy would be condemned at the highest levels of government? The deal was arranged by Señor Depuy De Lome, then Spain’s ambassador to the United States.

I would like to note a few details about this delivery. First, the means of warfare and the means of detention were both framed as protective by the authorities at the time. Much of the expansion of both detention and war was conducted by those who would profit from it directly. And those businesses often operated entirely outside the orbit of any kind of government control or regulation, even in a country with leadership ostensibly opposed to both the war and the mass detention itself.

The grill and the gégène

In a bit, I’ll circle back to who’s producing the means of detaining people in camps and violence against civilians in and outside those facilities today. But the other historical case I want to think about before we get to that isn’t related to the origins of the material tools used to harm or detain people, but instead about the origins of the ideas for how to do that harm, because those have their own production lines and distribution, too.

When I interviewed Felipe Aguero about his detention and torture in the Estadio Nacional in Santiago Chile in the wake of the 1973 coup for my book One Long Night, he described various kinds of premeditated violence committed against detainees. One of several that his interrogators inflicted on him was electrical torture.

In preparation, his assailants told him to strip naked then lie down. Wires were attached to his wrists and testicles. As his captors demanded answers to questions, they turned on the switch, completing the circuit that his body had become part of, shocking him painfully.

It was an obscene form of torture, combining terror with physical trauma and the cruelty of coopting the body to take part in harming itself. Where had these interrogators learned such inhumane tactics?

One possible source is Paul Aussaresses, who had been an advocate of (as well as an apologist for) torture by French forces during Algeria’s fight for independence from France in the 1950s and early 1960s. A former French Army general who joined the Free French forces during World War II, he also embraced torture against Algerians a decade later. After moving to Brazil in 1973, he advised military dictatorships in several South American countries on methods of torture—Chile among them. 

Through this route, or related ones, what was known as la parrilla in Chile—”the grill”—may have had origins rising out of the earlier use of the gégène—a nickname for the generatrice, a hand-cranked generator common in the first half of the twentieth century. And where did French forces in Algeria come up with the gegene? In their police forces at home in France.

While an early form of electric torture had been used by the French in Indochina, the first known use of it in France itself was during World War II, by Pierre Marty, a French traitor who was fighting the Resistance at home. Part of a group known as the “French Gestapo” and onetime top policeman in Toulouse, Marty is thought to be the person who brought electric torture to France. Small wonder it found its way to Algeria in the years that followed.

High-level government instruction has surely played a role in the introduction of new tactics in torture. But research from Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy, suggests that government-level meetings at the highest level may be less important than what happens on the ground. He tracks the paths by which torture is passed interrogator to interrogator, locally, almost as a craft. What is allowed in one particular setting can be shared when that torturer goes to the next place. Innovations in pain get passed along.

Evolution of tactics

Why bring up this nasty history? In the middle stages of concentration camps, a system often goes from one dominated by chaotic sadists to one that has a corps of clinical torturers. They learn all the ways to not leave marks while still doing significant harm. This transition from perverts to professional torturers is a common one, and a key step on the path to institutionalizing a camp system.

This process is how you go from a few high-visibility violent cowboys urging mayhem—such as Gregory Bovino egging on his officers in various U.S cities at demonstrations against Trump’s immigration policies—to something that appears calmer. Excessive violence in broad daylight shocks the public and leads to dissent. As a result, after an initial period of terror, that public excess often gets dialed down and hidden away, as the system transforms from one requiring active malice to one that can be sustained almost entirely through malicious negligence.

With a budget of tens of billion dollars for new detention beds already secured and an existing system that has long been designed to harm immigrants, much of the groundwork of creating a massive expansion of extrajudicial detention is already in place. Administration officials now understand, more or less, that if they want this current terror against immigrants to persist, they need to move more quietly and entrench what they’ve built. With the exception of Stephen Miller, most of the apparatchiks under Trump have shifted gears to lower decibels. But they have not stopped.

Those signs of entrenchment are visible outside government offices as well. The Oliver Brothers of yesteryear supplying barbed wire for concentration camps in Cuba may well have have become Eastern Airlines today, winning what may become a $327 million contract to support ICE air operations. As Gillian Brockell has reported, the original call for bid asked contractors to include proposals for running detention sites in third countries with beds for up to a thousand people each. We’ll soon find out whether Eastern is going into the concentration camp business. 

This month, we’ve seen pushback to Flock cameras’ omnipresent surveillance of civilian life. Incidences of stalking ex-partners by police officers using the data from the cameras have been reported. Measures to restrict their use in immigration enforcement are widely seen as insufficient. Recent concessions on the length of time that data is preserved may make a difference, but I’m dubious that they will hold, given that the fundamental nature of the devices relies on and tends toward facilitating a concentration camps society.

We’ve also recently seen the ankle monitors now put on Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. These immigrants have lived and worked legally for years in the U.S. but have now been criminalized by the sweeping changes to immigration policy. The tools used against innocent civilians to control them are not all new, but are used in new ways to exert the kind technological control that secret policemen in the Third Reich could only dream of.

And we see the gloves that give a painful electric shock to anyone grabbed by the wearer. ICE is planning to buy $20 million worth of the gloves, insisting that they won’t be used for torture. But one of their selling points, as with so many past kinds of torture, is that they cause pain but leave no mark. ICE is already torturing people by other means; what will happen if ICE agents wear these gloves isn’t a mystery.

What you can do

It’s difficult, given the budgets allocated, to keep every instance of entrenchment from happening. But for more than a year now, DHS has been struggling to find ways to use that money that will actually create the ever-expanding number of detention beds they want.

Why are they struggling? Because every time they try a new tactic, it gets slowed down or even shut down, and winds up getting a bad reputation. How does that happen? Through what so many people are doing locally—by turning their towns against forced labor in concentration camps like Delaney Hall in New Jersey, and using vigils to call attention to conditions at detention facilities at places like Broadview in Chicago and 26 Federal Plaza in New York. These tactics get foiled locally when people resist warehouses in their backyards, as we’ve witnessed nationwide in recent months.

Just as torturers on the ground teach their tactics to one another, and someone from the police department ends up working in a detention camp and using something he established there, we can claw back our culture on the ground, locally, too. Organize with local nonprofits, and connect with other groups in other towns and cities who have developed successful tactics.

Raise awareness in your community, press your local officials and businessowners to stand against profiting off of inhumane and criminal actions. Where they cannot be cajoled, make them afraid of legal consequences later.

Most people don’t approve of actual harm to their fellow human beings. If you can get out the story of what’s actually going on, these abuses will be met with disgust by a majority of people in the United States. It is tremendously dispiriting that any company would make gear capable of torturing others and sell it to people who torture other human beings. It is dispiriting that some companies are currently submitting bids to build additional ICE detention facilities for massive bonuses on an expedited basis.

But it can happen in large part because most people in the U.S. don’t realize these processes are underway. I am not saying that no one approves of what Trump is doing. Millions upon millions do. But millions of others have no idea what to think, because they don’t actually know about the terrible harm being done in their name.

The more people who find out, the less popular all this becomes. None of us can be responsible for filling the entire gulf in information created by propaganda, the dismantling of the U.S education system, and the collapse of journalism nationwide. But just as with the intimate tactics of cruelty in torture, passed along at the local level, we can reestablish a culture of humanity.

We can institute a refusal to support officials and businesses profiting politically or economically from others’ misery. We can demand basic decency from our neighbors where we live.

People who get captured by heinous political ideas online or who willingly enter groups that encourage them to be their worst selves are not highly susceptible to change. But a public effort close to home reframing what’s normal or acceptable is possible. We can illuminate the crisis for those not yet tuned in to our current reality.

We can keep the next Oliver Brothers from taking that contract. We can keep the government from normalizing the next torture device that it would like to use against the most vulnerable among us. Each tactic we stop helps break the torturers’ guild. Each contract we foil might shut down one more barbed-wire factory. And victory is contagious.

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In the latest podcast episode, I walk listeners through a timeline of the major initiatives the Trump administration has used to target immigrants since January 2025—and the many ways they’ve been foiled. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

As I mentioned on Tuesday, both Degenerate Art and Next Comes What will be on hiatus next week while I go on vacation. But we’ll be back on a regular schedule after that, starting with an August 18 Tuesday post.

A banner in Rakhine state in western Myanmar in early November 2016, celebrating Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. presidential election.

Last night, I was thinking about the executive orders issued by the Trump administration yesterday, in which the president tries to limit who actually gets birthright citizenship. The new rules he’s trying to set, with the guidance of Stephen Miller, are part of the larger project to ethnically purge the United States of nonwhite people.

The Constitution lays out that those born in the U.S. are citizens at birth. But Trump is now trying to insert legal caveats that would refuse citizenship to children of mothers whom the administration claims come here for “birth tourism,”, to children of those the White House deems terrorists or enemy aliens, and the children of foreigners in the U.S. who work for other governments.

Every time there’s some new manufactured outrage over who belongs in the U.S. and who gets the full protections of citizenship, it reminds me of the Rohingya Muslim community in Myanmar, and the way that their government slowly removed their citizenship and related rights over decades.

Trump’s executive orders don’t directly mirror what happened in Myanmar, because the two countries have very different histories. But there are parallels between what Trump is trying to do today and the slow erosion of Rohingya citizenship overseas. Trump aspires to do with his executive power what Myanmar has already done.

More than a hundred different ethnicities are recognized for citizenship purposes in Myanmar. Yet despite a history going back centuries in the country, the Rohingya are now excluded—due in part to the country’s tortured past. As in many colonies, British imperial rule from the 1820s through the mid-twentieth century pitted different minority communities against one another, maintaining control by preferential treatment of some groups. This practice encouraged gaps in education, money, and status between ethnicities, destabilizing the larger society.

I’ll condense a complicated history into just a few paragraphs: At independence in 1948, ideals of inclusion prevailed. All groups deemed present in the country in 1823, before the beginning of British rule, had the rights of citizenship, including the Rohingya. But democracy and inclusion alike were shattered in 1962 with a military coup, leaving in power generals who rejected the Rohingya as foreigners, claiming this particular Muslim minority had not actually existed in Myanmar before British rule. A piece-by-piece dismantling of Rohingya rights began.

A tremendous escalation in tactics took place in 1978, as hundreds of thousands of Rohingya living in Myanmar were forced out of Rakhine state and across the western border, fleeing into Bangladesh. After international pressure to reverse the exodus, many returned the following year, but others did not. The situation remained volatile. In 1982, a new citizenship law was put into place, and the Rohingya were deliberately excluded, now by formal statute.

The community, however, continued to be politically useful as a target. They were officially stateless, and portrayed as illegal aliens. Burmese nationalist politicians, as well as extremist Buddhist movements, and a variety of other actors demonized the Rohingya regularly through dehumanizing rhetoric and threats—the kind of language used against Muslims in the U.S. after the 9/11 attacks.

Further purges forced them out of the country again. Over time, thousands crossed the border again and again, becoming itinerant due to recurrent threats of violence. In a circular argument, being forced out and then absent was depicted as proof that the Rohingya were not really from Myanmar and should not be allowed to return.

For those who stayed or came back to Rakhine state, conditions disintegrated. In 2012 after intracommunal local violence, the Rohingya were forced out of Sittwe (the capital city of Rakhine state) in a massive purge. Under threat of death, they fled or were transported out to the countryside, where they were left on their own. Eventually camps were set up for them, and they were barred from returning to everyday life in the city. A few Rohingya were allowed to stay in one section of town, Aung Mingalar, but barriers were erected to transform that quarter into an isolated ghetto.

After years of political resistance by activists in Myanmar who demanded a return to democracy, the country held actual elections in 2015. Yet even that gain was undercut by some provisions barring groups of voters and others tilting the electoral system toward continued military influence. The civilian opposition nevertheless prevailed, and it seemed like there was a chance democracy might triumph—if only a small one.

But with the deck stacked against them, civilian political leaders held power only tenuously, and did not adopt the cause of reintegrating the Rohingya. In 2016 and early 2017, despite civilian rule at the time, massive violence was unleashed in Rakhine state, with tens of thousands of Rohingya executed and hundreds of villages burned. Rape, torture, and murder were widespread.

Conditions in the region remained atrocious even before the military seized power again in 2021 coup. Since then, the genocide in Rakhine state has continued.

The dissolution of rights and violence in this arc of persecution is reflected in the official paperwork Rohingya individuals carried over time. After independence, the Rohingya had the same identification cards held by other citizens of the country. Then the Rohingya were issued green cards as identification that still guaranteed some rights, but not full citizenship. Later, white cards replaced the green cards.

When I went to Myanmar in 2015 and visited Aung Mingalar and two Rohingya camps, the government was deep into the process of recalling all the white cards. The year before my visit, Rohingya Muslims could still vote and run for political office. And months before my arrival, the government announced the Rohingya would be able to vote in the fall election. But officials reversed that decision the next day, after outrage by extremists. It was also clear that Rohingya candidates, even those already serving in the national legislature, would not be allowed to run again.

The government then replaced the white cards with National Verification Cards (NVCs). Rohingya residents of Myanmar who were born in the country and whose families have lived in it for generations could only get an NVC if they accepted a racial categorization of “Bengali” and illegal-alien status. NVCs were the only kind of official identification the Rohingya could get, leaving them utterly dependent.

This, then, was the administrative face of the larger genocide that unfolded across the country decade after decade, slowly until suddenly it wasn’t.

Could you prove your family’s legal presence in the U.S.? Not just through obituaries or photos, but using legal documents? When these things get contested, the government sets the rules and has all the leverage. Bit by bit, the requirements change, and fewer and fewer people can get over all the hurdles. And then, imagine that your whole community is locked down into a ghetto or run out outside town under threat of into camps without warning. What proof would you have with you?

In the end, it wouldn’t matter. Because if the valid paperwork can be changed or revoked by an authoritarian, and made to exclude those who had been included, bit by bit, the status of vulnerable groups is erased and undone (much as Temporary Protected Status for Haitians was recently revoked). The ability to exist legally in society is removed. And once the paperwork side of things has been taken care of, it’s just a matter of time until the background violence escalates into something much more lethal.

We are not yet where Myanmar is. But make no mistake: with these executive orders, Trump and Miller are using similar tactics with similar goals. And without resistance blocking their agenda, we will end up a similar place. Being able to vote in elections is a critical tool! But in and of itself, it will not guarantee an end to the harm that the administration intends to do—and in many cases is already doing.

The good news is that in the U.S., unlike Myanmar, the aspiring tyrant’s control over information and free speech is much more limited. We have many ways to push back. But we have to actually do it.

To close on on another small, good note: I saw that a judge dismissed the case against former Olympian David Hearn, who was facing a felony charge of vandalizing the reflecting pool on the National Mall. It had been apparent from the beginning that the charges were garbage, and the White House’s version of events entirely invented, with the scraps of synthetic material floating loose in the water due to a poor installation of a new lining by Trump’s preferred contractor. Even Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District, backed off the case last week in the face of actual evidence.

But it’s always good when the simple facts of reality are asserted in a binding way against the delusions and bad-faith arguments that the corrupt and powerful are currently trying to impose on the country and the world. May all those who are currently persecuted likewise see vindication.

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First up, a little news: This week, the newsletter and podcast will both follow a normal schedule. Next week, however, I’ll be on vacation. Which means there will be no Tuesday or Friday post on August 10 and 14. We’ll start back up as usual on August 18 for the newsletter, with a Next Comes What episode later that week.

At this point, we’re over eighteen months into the second Trump administration. Officials have unleashed countless crises in health, science, medicine, government services, military affairs, foreign affairs, and several other arenas. On top of it all, we’re trapped in a totally unnecessary and unbelievably dangerous war that’s following the plot of Groundhog Day.

In addition to the war, there are, to my mind, three particularly significant horror shows unfolding right now—ones that may be easier for most Americans to ignore or fail to notice than the war. The first, which I try to mention almost every week, is the ongoing death toll of the cuts to USAID. We are on track for millions of deaths to take place before the end of the first Trump administration. The second, which is also easy to miss, despite current conditions, is climate change. The third—which is the focus of this post and the one I write most about on here—is the war on immigrants and the concentration camp system that Trump and Stephen Miller have prioritized expanding exponentially while they are still able to.

So many major shifts have happened, I want to use today’s post to review a timeline of the second Trump administration’s actions attacking immigrants, note the big developments and major shifts that have brought us to where we are now, and to think a little about what’s on the horizon.

But before I get to that, I’d like to take a moment to say that there’s also a lot of good news happening. As each new case comes forward, judges continue to reject the president’s demand that states to the federal government. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating is in the toilet.

Crushed ice melting on a summer sidewalk.

Trump second-administration priorities

Looking back to January 2025, by the time Donald Trump and Stephen Miller returned to Washington D.C. to take the reins of government, several goals were already apparent. They had regularly spoken publicly about deporting some 20 million people—a population removal operation on a scale that would completely eclipse some of the most heinous projects in history. And since at least 2019, Stephen Miller had talked at length about building massive tent cities along the border to facilitate the expansion of the existing system.

Those first six months back in office, they didn’t wait to lay any significant groundwork, before moving ahead with the agenda they’d decided on. In March and April, the government cut a multimillion-dollar, multi-year deal to outsource detention to CECOT, an infamous prison in El Salvador. The president tried to seize wartime powers that had only ever been executed in limited circumstances, claiming that the U.S. was facing actual invasion by immigrants. The government defied some judicial orders openly while resisting others, in what appeared to be collaboration with a foreign dictator to avoid complying with U.S. law and court decisions.

That spring, the administration also began aggressively arresting and detaining immigrant students, seeming to focus on those who had protested, spoken, or even simply written about the massive death toll among Palestinians as retribution for the terror attack in October 2023. Mahmoud Khalil spent more than three months detained, Leqaa Kordia more than a year. Rumeysa Ozturk was held over an opinion piece she wrote for a student newspaper at Tufts University. These student arrests fused an attack on U.S. Universities with the anti-immigrant and anti-Palestinian agendas of the administration.

By June, Trump had seized control of more than four thousand National Guard troops in Los Angeles, asserting a federal law-and-order role for them in circumstances that clearly violated long-settled law. While this might seem extraneous to the question of concentration camp-style detention, the ways that concentration camp regimes federalize control of law enforcement is consistent, making Trump attempts to do so alarming.

July to December 2025

And the start of July, before the first six months of Trump’s second administration had ended, Congress finalized a budget providing $45 billion for immigrant detention. Forty-five billion dollars is a staggering sum—it’s more than 60% larger than the budget of the federal prison system. (For all that I often complain about the ways in which Democrats have failed to stand up for immigrants against the racism and violence that have dominated immigration policy over the last four decades, in this case, not a single Democratic member of Congress in the House voted for the creation and expansion of concentration camps nationwide.)

The rest of 2025 saw broader moves to implement this budget and an attempt to more systematically terrorize not just isolated immigrant communities but Trump’s opponents and the whole country. The same month the budget was passed, a plan leaked on how ICE intended to use this massive increase to expand detention capacity to more than 107,000 beds by the end of 2025. How were they going to do it? Using the kinds of tent-style camps Stephen Miller had been talking about for years: tent cities.

The concentration camp in the Everglades, which Trump and his allies officially named Alligator Alcatraz, opened on July 3, 2025. Camp East Montana opened weeks later at Fort Bliss in Texas. (Fort Bliss had previously been a site of Japanese American detention during World War II.)

Camp East Montana put in place Miller’s apparent vision of tent cities to hold immigrants in horrific conditions on purpose, to terrorize them into signing away their rights to due process. The administration simultaneously sought to engage ad hoc judges with a National Guard JAG background but without immigration experience for the Everglades camp.

Both the tent cities and the ad-hoc end run around normal processes of justice—no matter how problematic the prior everyday processes were—are both significant warning signs when considered in the light of concentration camp history. Nasty, unsafe, or ineffective shelter in deliberately hostile locations has been a hallmark of the early stages of concentration camp regimes before they expand and develop long-term infrastructure. In cases where these sort of camps have been used, health crises have been common, and public outrage over them significant.

Two weeks after the Everglades camp opened, I wrote about the heartless ways that concentration camp administrators had used mosquitoes on detainees in various systems from the twentieth century, and talked about how the Florida was repeating this history. Less than a week later, reports emerged of mosquitoes being weaponized in the same ways at the Everglades camp.

Along with tent cities, the other key element of the hyper-funded detention project could be seen on the streets, in very public terror operations nationwide to secure more detainees to fill the new sites. Operations in Los Angeles and Chicago led to whole communities of noncitizens and citizens alike being terrified to go to the store, to church, or to school.

But neighbors came together, and developed tactics from cutting-edge text alerts to old-fashioned hardware like whistles. They delivered food to people who were isolated. Those seeking to help support the detained kept vigils outside facilities, calling attention to immigrants incarcerated by the government.

By then, Gregory Bovino of the Border Patrol had made himself the face of these brutal operations, defying a judge’s orders and encouraging his men to target protesters and immigrants alike. Before the end of the year, he led Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities.

But the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti galvanized the country against these operations in ways that some prior shootings and deaths hadn’t previously—perhaps because more outlets paid attention to white casualties, and perhaps in part because even those who might have accepted the racist framing of Trump and Miller couldn’t find a way to justify killing protesters who were citizens.

Public backlash followed. Kristi Noem would soon be gone as head of Homeland Security, and Bovino would wind up in a premature retirement, as the government tried to play down the public terror, in order to sidestep massive street demonstrations while quietly pursuing the same violence against immigrants.

Trans corollary aside

When I mentioned the three big crises at the top of this post—USAID deaths, climate change, and concentration camps—I had another one in mind as well: the current, expanding demonization of trans folks. The push to exclude and erase trans people is both hateful and strategic.

My sense is that in both those ways it’s bound up tightly with the demonization of immigrants, the targeting of the homeless, as well as the removal from power of black folks and women. Each of these groups is targeted for removal from any public existence that includes full rights, citizenship, and agency.

My sense is that immigrants are the ones being attacked with the most open violence at present. But the same tactics and dynamics that radicalized a significant minority of Americans against immigrants are now in play against trans people. We’re just witnessing an earlier stage of the demonization. A story out this week about U.S. Army Captain Kai Proce traces the Department of Defense’s systematic removal of trans people from service through shameful hearings in which the outcome has been decided by top brass before each session even begins.

ICE pivots on detention

By early 2026, it was clear that tent cities like the Everglades camp and Camp East Montana were dangerous enough that their harms would create legal jeopardy for the government, as well as public resistance. In Florida, the environmental claims laid by the Miccosukee tribe also presented serious legal issues.

So ICE and DHS began to pivot. In the first days of February, Pablo Manriquez’s reporting for Migrant Insider showed that the Trump administration’s new plan, already in progress, was to use additional expeditionary contracts, this time through the process overseen by the U.S. Navy, to quickly stand up a number of camps domestically. But this dodgy scheme soon ran into problems with elected officials uneasy over the arrangement.

Within weeks, it became clear that the government was going to attempt to re-engineer ICE detention via another route. The idea was to buy existing warehouses and retrofit them into being detention camps. The specs for these proposals recalled some of the worst moments from history.

In the five months since those plans were made public, local movements have shown how powerful they can be in stopping ICE. After nearly a billion dollars was spent by the government to buy up warehouses, as people found out what was planned for their communities, they rose up. In some cases, they even garnered support from Republican elected officials, from the local to the national. In every case, they brought together people who did not want a concentration camp in their backyard.

As effective resistance mounted, Trump’s allies appeared to realize the broad re-engineering they had tried to move forward with wouldn’t go according to plan. Both the tent cities approach and the warehouse approach to massively expanding ICE detention have been failures, though the former has persisted long enough to harm thousands at Camp East Montana and in Florida.

“Alligator Alcatraz” is now shuttered. But despite rumors of plans for Camp East Montana to close after deaths—including one homicide—there, that facility is still open today and remains the largest immigrant detention site in the country.

What lies ahead

Last month, Charles Davis wrote in the Redoubt about a call for companies to develop plans on servicing ICE flights deporting people around the world. The government referenced 1,000-bed facilities for detention of deportees in foreign countries—the creation of a global network of concentration camps.

Around the same time, Project Salt Box reported on a solicitation that had just gone out. The solicitation lays out a construction program worth up to $10 billion—what Salt Box refers to as “a move to build and expand detention space on land the agency owns rather than lease it.” Proposals are due in mid-August, with a two-year window in which to complete construction and begin operations.

If these plans move forward, I expect to see attempts to fight their implementation. But in foreign countries, or on land in the U.S. that the government already owns and controls, it will—at least in some cases—be harder to prevail using the same tactics that have been so successful in fighting the warehouse approach.

In the meantime, we’ve almost reached the one-year anniversary of National Guard troop presence in D.C., with federal plans to extend it through the end of Trump’s rule. Elsewhere, Republican governors have welcomed similar contingents of guard members to their states, bending the knee to Trump’s attacks on cities as dens of crime and filth.

Leaders in some blue states who were willing to stand against Trump effectively regained control over their own National Guard members through open defiance or legal action. But the District, with its legacy colonial role in the U.S. political system, still faces a second status as a city that Republicans can and do seek to control and punish at almost every turn.

This November will bring elections, which are vitally important to the future of democracy—but which can also only change so much, at least for now. Even if, by hard work or miracles, the Democrats manage to retake both houses of Congress, they’re not going to have a veto-proof majority. (To do so, in the Senate, they would have to hold every Democratic Senate seat in addition to winning 20 of 22 Republican Senate seats—which is not going to happen.)

As a result, Trump will retain a lot of power to block any new legislation through veto. But if the Democrats get control of one or both houses, their ability to launch investigations of ICE practices, DHS officials, and corruption in federal contracts will expand tremendously. And just as Trump will be able to obstruct Congress, they will be able to stonewall parts of his agenda as well.

What you can do

We shouldn’t wait until November to act. There are so many examples and resources now on how to tackle ICE abuses, illegal detention practices, and the very existence of detention facilities around the country.

Take a look at the recent Project Salt Box rundown of the possibly $10 billion proposal in which ICE appears to be pivoting to yet another style of detention. See if any of the sites referenced are in your state, and begin planning now. Watch for who submits bids. Organize against them now. In 2026, the movement protecting immigrants and fighting Trump’s concentration camps is larger, less naive, and far more powerful than it was even two years ago.

Public disapproval of Trump, ICE’s methods, and arbitrary detention itself have grown to include a lot of normie folks. The entire system of immigrant detention is in the process of being de-legitimized. When the government can’t find enough people to hire, because ICE is unpopular, it buys more time for the people those agents would be rounding up. Each time the government has to pivot to a new approach to creating new beds at new sites, it buys more time in which to create conditions in which that money can be clawed back and put to better uses.

So many people have been harmed, and are continuing to suffer this very minute. But we—and by we, I mean you—have already done so much amazing work to fight that harm. Today, there are existing movements in place involving those who have resisted everything from the neighborhood roundups to facilities like Dilley and the Everglades camps, or people who have worked to end city and county collaborations with ICE.

Those opposed to Trump and Miller have created a network that is both local and national. However many suggestions I make for ways that people can push back, I’m always amazed at the new strategies that everyday people come up with and make work on their own, creating a better world one tactic at a time.

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In the latest podcast episode, I talk about how resistance to corruption and despotism in India and Albania offer a model for people hoping to protect democracy in the U.S. These movements are still emerging, but their early power shows how smaller issues can become symbols for larger movements. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

Today, I’ll write about an encounter that happened almost seven years ago, well into the public outcry over family separation during the first Trump administration. My history of concentration camps had been out two years at that point. But millions of people in the U.S. who were worried about the president’s xenophobia still hadn’t come to terms with exactly what “immigration enforcement” had already meant for some time, and just how much worse the crisis could get.

A university in Chicago had invited me to speak on the history of concentration camps. To the administrators’ credit, they did not try to get me to agree in advance to avoid the border crisis, or to promise not to call U.S. immigration detention “concentration camps.”

Some Uighur students had shown up for the talk, and were willing to share details of what it meant that their parents were detained in Xinjiang, and how that detention had affected their families. I briefly mentioned the Chinese treatment of Uighurs in my lecture, and the attendees’ accounts were a powerful reminder to everyone present that concentration camps weren’t just some abstract historical concept.

But the exchange I want to focus on now is from another conversation that happened during and after the same event. I made reference to it in the same thread on Twitter. Two people in attendance said that they were working within the U.S. border detention system, and were aware of what was happening. They were trying to think through how people in the past weighed maintaining humanity inside an increasingly cruel system versus just walking away altogether.

I tried to acknowledge the choice isn’t always a simple one. The decision to walk away from a job isn’t the same for everyone—sometimes it comes with a very high cost. And there are cases in which people who stayed on the inside in regimes that had turned to concentration camps were able to do a lot of good—typically by secretly sabotaging the goals of the ruling party or taking on illegal roles to save people, often in an administrative capacity. Some survivors owe their lives to such people.

Yet far more people wound up compromised or complicit, inadvertently supporting a harmful or even evil system—often in ways they’d never imagined. Governments that operate camps are malleable and aggressive. They innovate new ways to harm, sometimes in surprising ways.

I mentioned some writing by M. Gessen, who had publicly explored weighing choices while working as a journalist and editor in Vladimir Putin’s Moscow years ago. And I pointed out pivotal moments in history that had clarified matters for everyday people in other countries faced with similar dilemmas.

After the lecture, they came up to me to talk more, and were accompanied by some coworkers. No longer speaking in front of the whole room, they confided that several of them worked for the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). In their official roles, at least some of them helped children who had been separated from their families by the administration reunite with parents or relatives.

They were disturbed by the tactics of that first Trump administration. But they worked for the Administration for Children and Families, part of Health and Human Services, not ICE or Border Patrol. How could staying in their jobs make them complicit in any way or cause harm, they wondered, if all they did was to help these children who were suffering so terribly? Wasn’t that critical work?

Rather than hectoring anyone over a tough decision, I tried to quietly go through the typical ways in which harm can happen, even when a person’s motives for staying are good—even when they may still be doing work that helps people in danger.

First, good people help to legitimize a dangerous system of detention by staying. Supporters of the ruling party can point to those who stay to argue that the system has not changed so much that long-term employees or holdovers from the last administration are leaving. Vulnerable people who recognize the good in employees who remain willing to help others may expose themselves to greater risk, thinking that the danger is not significant, and that there’s no possibility that anyone will come to serious harm.

Second, by helping one legitimate part of an illegitimate system to function, you free up personnel and resources to handle the vile tasks. Walking away can help reveal the existing system’s incompetence and malice.

Third, not only is it possible that you won’t be able protect the people you think you can by staying, but your own work may be used to harm them.

After everyone cleared out of the room that evening back in 2019, I knew that the ORR staff were still undecided. I heard later from one of them that he’d decided to stay in his current position.

I was hoping to talk further with him. But at the time, my mother was suffering from both paranoia and Alzheimer’s, and my stepfather dying of lung cancer. Preparing to bring her to live with me to protect my stepfather from her, I dropped nearly every plate I was spinning. Three months later, Covid struck.

***

Reading a news story this week, I thought of those staffers again. Since Trump’s return to office in January 2025, Reuters reports, “ORR has shared more than 460,000 ‘leads’ with ICE about unaccompanied children, their sponsors—usually parents or other relatives—and additional ​household members, leaving them vulnerable to detention and deportation.”

There have now been “more than 12,000 people arrested ‌by U.S. immigration authorities following tips from the Office of Refugee Resettlement during President Donald Trump’s second term, according to internal government data reviewed exclusively by Reuters.”

Trump stains the reputation of everyone who thought they would outsmart him, or that they could control him. And a concentration camp society, in the end, warps every official act toward detention of vulnerable groups.

I’ll reach out in the coming days to see if I can find out what had happened with those ORR workers: what decisions they made, where they are now, and what thoughts they have about their choices. If they have anything they want to say, I’ll share their insights.

All this is worth keeping this in mind at a time when many people may feel tempted to lie low and not push back against the heinous acts of our government. And certainly, there are those who are at significant risk merely by virtue of their existence. But for the rest of us, nearly seven years after I made the same argument in that Chicago lecture hall, I would still say that walking away from any work that braces the regime is one of the most dramatic and effective ways to reduce its power, helping to save the country or even a single person’s humanity.

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As the ruling party in the U.S. continues to degrade American society and undermine the country’s allies, the magnitude of the challenge before us can feel exhausting. Yet people here at home do take action every day to protect their neighbors.

And others are doing the same thing abroad. In prior posts, I’ve looked at movements in South Korea, Hungary, and other countries that have managed to block authoritarian power grabs. But in the most memorable examples I’ve described, events had already taken their most dramatic turns by the time I covered them, with national leaders stepping up and the public backing them, quickly leading to reversals of fortune for aspiring or established despots.

But in cases where war and invasion aren’t the prime drivers, successful movements that get rid of would-be tyrants tend to emerge from a more complex series of events than just the dramatic end game in which a leader is arrested, convicted, or removed. So today, I’ll look at two examples of resistance that are at an earlier stage in that process for now, yet are still significant.

In recent months, Albanians have risen up in outrage over plans for Jared Kushner and, by association, Ivanka Trump to acquire and develop ecologically valuable land that’s also part of the country’s national heritage. And in India, just days ago, thousands of students in India who have been protesting for the last several weeks shockingly won all their demands from the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi.

I want to ponder what these two protest-based movements have been doing, how they’re setting the stage for deeper change in each society, and what we might be able to learn from their examples.

The satirically named Cockroach People’s Party in India has led to real change.

Successes at home

Before I consider the Indian and Albanian examples, I want to take a moment to mention some recent events here in the United States. After local organizers in Pennsylvania fought back, ICE was forced to give up plans for two rural detention facilities in that state. Facilities in the planning stages were met with complaints showing the population in detention would far exceed the number of local residents and would unavoidably stress area infrastructure. Miguel Andrade of the Shut Down Detention campaign told WHYY that the $207 million the federal government used to purchase the warehouses “should have been invested in people, not detention.”

All the way back in February, Governor Josh Shapiro told federal officials the state would not issue required permits for potential ICE detention facilities in Berks and Schuylkill counties. At the same time, Bucks County commissioners voted unanimously to block ICE from opening a detention facility in the area. And the vote had bipartisan support, with the lone Republican commissioner saying, “Bucks County is not a county that needs or wants a detention facility.”

Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection likewise came out early, prohibiting DHS from using the sites for detention. The department argued that the facilities would be a threat to the health of the community and local residents. And just last week, the governor’s office confirmed that plans for detention at both sites had been cancelled.

I’ll take another moment to note that the Everglades concentration camp the administration named Alligator Alcatraz has formally been eradicated from the face of the Earth. Closure of the camp happened a month ago, but now control of the site itself has been returned to Miami-Dade, with officials saying the airstrip that had been converted to a camp will return to its role of letting pilots of small craft train for landing and takeoff.

Historically, when concentration camps close, it’s important to undo the physical structure of detention as well, because camps are often resurrected at a later point for similar or worse purposes. Not only closing the camp but returning control of it to municipal authorities is a small but important part of the dismantling of authoritarian power. Now we need an investigation of the abuses that took place there, from both an environmental and a human rights perspective. This is something the Miccosukee Tribe and Florida immigrants’ rights groups have been demanding for some time.

Meanwhile in Albania

Moving on to other places in the world where people are taking on strongmen, let’s start in Albania. Part of the Soviet sphere of influence after World War II, Albania remained communist until 1990. In the decades since, it has struggled with mercenary mafia capitalism preventing actual democracy from taking root in ways that parallel many former Soviet nations and republics.

Recent protests over commercial development of Sazan Island, the westernmost part of Albania and the country’s largest island, are only the newest chapter in a history of pushback against the current government. In the wake of Albania’s 2025 parliamentary elections, separate protests alleging election shenanigans were organized by various political opponents of the regime between last November and May of this year. Actions included everything from calling out specific officials and marching in the street to Molotov cocktails thrown by protesters and violent assaults by police.

In May, many disparate parts of the opposition were fused together or subsumed into a broader protest movement, now known as The Flamingo Revolution. The movement began with a local demonstration near Sazan Island and the site of the planned multibillion-dollar Zvërnec resort that Jared Kushner had cut deals with the government to develop.

After protesters were roughed up, public outrage erupted. Demonstrations expanded to Tirana, the Albanian capital, and became about much more than the deal with Kushner. Protesters are now demanding the resignation of the current prime minister, Edi Rama. They also want constitutional and electoral reforms, with term limits for the prime minister.

They’re likewise demanding reversal of existing statutes on foreign investment and development. Though Edi Rama has been in charge for years now, the main opposition leader, Sali Berisha, is himself a former president and prime minister of the country who also inflicted tremendous damage on Albanian democracy during his rule. As a result, protesters are rejecting both leaders and seeking more fundamental political reform.

Indian student revolt

The Cockroach Janta Party formed in May, mocking the name of the Bharatiya Janata Party—or Indian People’s Party—headed up by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. The party’s formation began as a satirical point about the government response to leaked questions from the national exam for entry to medical school. As a result of the reported leak, the exam was cancelled after millions of students had taken it. (The test had been the end point of a process of grueling preparation many test-takers had worked on for years.)

In the midst of all this and other dissatisfaction among Indian youth, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant compared some activists and unemployed young people to “cockroaches” who go on social media and whine. Thirty-year-old Abhijeet Dipke founded the “Cockroach Janta Party” in response to his comment.

The party began as a joke, but a real movement formed. Dipke came back to India (he had been in the U.S.), and physical protests over the crisis started in June in New Delhi. Officials moved to shut down more than a dozen metro stations and access to mobile data at the main site of the protest in the hope of blocking its effectiveness.

But their efforts backfired, leading to additional demonstrations in several other large cities. (For an even more detailed timeline of the evolution of the protests, see this New York Times tick-tock.)

A well-known activist supported the growing student movement, and began a hunger strike in solidarity. A week ago, in an attempt to break the will of students, police tear-gassed and beat protesters. Afterward, demonstrations expanded even more widely across the country, and authorities tried to detain protesters, as vigils were kept around the clock.

Victory for students

Protesters had long been demanding the resignation of education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, and in recent days, finally succeeded in their quest. Modi had tried to placate his opponents with other, smaller concessions, but proved unable to cajole or break them.

When the government was forced to meet their demands instead, a public announcement was held to resolve the crisis, with government ministers and student protesters present as peer stakeholders at a table. Officials agreed to drop attempts to prosecute protesters and to the students’ charter for exam reform.

After public acknowledgment that education minister Pradhan would go, the leadership of the Cockroach Party called off the protests and celebrated their victory. Commenters noted that it was a sharp reprimand to Modi’s heavy-handed government and a win for popular action and resistance.

This example shows the way that political change takes time to develop, and often begins with specific demands by one community. When leaders who have portrayed themselves as invincible are forced to reckon not only with the wealthy or corporate powerholders—who might be seen as their peers—but instead with everyday people and mass movements, it opens new vulnerabilities that can be exploited to eventually remove the authoritarian from power.

And you can be sure that Modi will not go easily. Nearly as soon as the deal had been made, and student leaders had told their followers to go home, reports began to spread of the arrest of hundreds of protesters. The new round of arrests appeared to take place far from New Delhi, in cities where Modi has a stronger grip on power. The students now face the question of how to respond.

Student groups in the U.S.

The question of state violence is something that has come up again and again in recent years with mass student protests in the U.S. With isolated exceptions, university leadership in the U.S. has deeply damaged democracy through its treatment of protesters who tried to call attention to genocidal actions by the Israeli government in Palestine.

Instead of separating out legitimate concerns about antisemitism on campus from scaremongering and political scapegoating of activists, many university presidents and boards turned on their own students, subjecting them to a whole array of discipline by the universities themselves, and, in some cases, harm at the hands of law enforcement. These harms include prosecution, abuse, and deportation.

Several key administrators simultaneously undermined their universities’ role in independent thought by caving to Trump and his minions, letting the U.S. government strongarm them into claiming things were antisemitic that clearly were not and agreeing to roll back efforts to integrate the academy racially and culturally. Part of the result of all the caving by university leaders is already being felt in falling enrollment from minority communities.

In addition, some campus protesters in the U.S. currently face charges that could result in significant jail time. Just last month, federal prosecutors secured indictments of eight people with ties to the University of Michigan that include felony charges against all of them. The charges appear to lump together activities of permitted protest with vandalism, rolling them up and presenting them as a larger conspiracy.

Student protesters have been targeted both by their own administrators and a government keen to shut down dissent. This inability to organize on campus in some traditional ways has done real harm to the broader student protest movement, though many have nonetheless persisted.

And high school students around the U.S.—in Texas, Virginia, Washington state, and elsewhere, have in some cases received more support for their right to protests than a number of university administrators have offered. In the first half of 2026, thousands had left class to speak out publicly against ICE detention. But some state governments, as in Texas, have been trying to shut that down, too, by investigating school principals, districts, and superintendents.

What we can do

There are a series of ideas worth pondering here. First is that small things can become crucial symbols of larger things. Sometimes it’s simply that the little things come together and add up to one big thing. At other times, the small thing is what finally fuels outrage enough for people to do something about the bigger issues.

So go ahead and join national efforts, but it’s also a great idea to focus on a local crisis, whether it’s a detention facility near you or a policy you want your city or town to change. It’s often easier for people to understand and get informed about—and even get mad about!—something close to home. (Especially if it’s not already automatically slotted into national debates.)

The small thing—like Trump family corruption fusing with local officials’ corruption in Albania, or a satirical protest over government response to a cancelled exam in India—can be the vehicle that allows big issues like ministerial accountability and education reform to take concrete form in the minds of those who might not be tied into existing groups or feel capable of forcing significant change.

And sometimes it’s the small joke, or coming together on social media, that allows a big movement to grow. The New York Times reported that the Cockroach people’s party accounts ended up in some cases eclipsing the social media presence of India’s established parties. Millions of followers on social media is no guarantee of social change. But in this era, one can be a means to reaching the other.

It’s fine to fight for democracy, against the power of ICE, and to tackle the biggest problems we have. But in addition to connecting to national groups, look for something specific: a change you can demand in your town or your state, something you actually care about. If it matters to you, you’ll be more convincing talking to others about it, and it has a better chance of mattering to them, too.

And if you make a specific demand for change, you can open doors to connecting with others making related demands. You never know what will trigger the next Cockroach Party victory or Flamingo Revolution—or what might come after that.

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In the latest podcast episode, I talk about what we can do about the violations of both the rule of law and our cultural norms that the current administration represents, and how people are already fighting back on both fronts. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

A snippet of the 2009 stories on the Dozier School from the St. Petersburg Times.

I’ve been hearing from a number of friends and acquaintances who usually feel competent at navigating daily life but now find themselves feeling almost paralyzed on a regular basis, due to all the current political and social crises unfolding today.

Any jump in anxiety levels is surely due in part to the fact that groups of people who might not have felt targeted by the government before are suddenly realizing that the administration is happy to commit widespread violence. But my sense is that another big shift is happening for countless people. Many will be familiar with the feeling, but for others, it will be their first experience with anything of this magnitude.

Millions of Americans—consciously or not—are recognizing for the first time that we’re trapped in a horror story. And by “horror story,” I mean exactly that: a specific and very old narrative arc we understand intuitively. This understanding elicits a response that’s logical, even if it’s overwhelming. To understand why it would even matter, consider for a moment the similarities and differences between disaster and horror films. (I’m writing about the trends in both categories, but of course there are outliers in each genre.)

Both kinds of movies tend to feature an individual or group of plucky humans confronted by death and mayhem in highly dramatic ways, pitting the protagonist(s) against something bigger or much more powerful. But the disaster film springs out of physical catastrophe. While that central catastrophe can be caused by human negligence or greed—such as the corner-cutting during the construction in the skyscraper at the heart of the Towering Inferno—the biggest threat in a disaster film rarely results from malice.

Malice, however, sits at the heart of horror. Even in cases where the monster or killer has an origin story driven by a just fury over a past or unreachable foe, horror recounts the carnage it deliberately unleashes as punishment. It is coming intentionally for you. This knowledge provokes dread, which is the dominant emotion in horror.

By contrast, disaster movies are at heart hopeful enterprises—we are kept in suspense over how many of the cast will manage to survive through grit and collaboration. Horror movies keep us agonizing over how many will die.

In both kinds of movies, characters often face their greatest danger in isolation. Yet the alone-ness of the horror movie inflicts a more profound psychological toll. Horror also emphasizes recurrence and exists beyond the timeline of the current story. Today’s violence parallels past tragedy in a cycle that will continue unless the main characters find a way to break it.

With a few marginal exceptions, the disaster movie’s death toll is limited to the cascade of casualties of a singular, specific event. But in a horror film, the cycle of death will continue to expand into future timelines indefinitely, unless the killer is stopped for good.

***

These are just some observations about fictional genres. But they’re also recognizable in narrative reporting about events in our world. Back in 2009, I highlighted “For Their Own Good,” a two-part series on the Dozier School for Boys written by Ben Montgomery and Waveney Ann Moore. It ran in the St. Petersburg Times and described the systemic abuse of teen boys in Marianna, Florida. Several former detainees had come forward in middle age to talk about the gruesome abuse and suffering they faced at the school.

But there was an even deeper horror that Montgomery and Moore unearthed. By going back into the archives. they found that the abuses had been going on for a century. At regular intervals, local reporters would be tipped off and investigate. A scandal would follow. And in some cases, cosmetic changes would be made. Then the whole cycle would start all over again, decade after decade. (You can see the whole project, including some devastating photography, here.)

In a horror story, the only hope is that understanding the cycle might make it possible to break free of it. And through the reporters’ incorporation of all that history, political and community leaders in Florida began to see the Dozier School in those terms.

It helped that the series was a finalist for the Pulitzer in Local Reporting the following year. The school failed an inspection. The governor launched a probe, and state authorities and the Department of Justice both investigated. The school was shut down in 2011.

A year later, forensic anthropologists were brought in try to locate bodies buried on the campus. In 2017, the state issued a formal apology to survivors. In 2024, the Florida legislature passed a law setting aside $20 million to compensate the men who had been held at Dozier as minors. By June 2025, the funds had been paid out to nearly a thousand applicants.

The next month, however, journalist Leonora LaPeter Anton, who had been a reporter for many years at the St. Petersburg Times as well (including after the paper’s name was changed to the Tampa Bay Times) wound up writing a heartbreaking narrative for the Marshall Project about the staggering number of men sent to Florida’s death row who were or are survivors of the Dozier School. (Full disclosure: Leonora and I have become friends in recent years.)

Detention at Dozier itself has stopped. But for those who entered its gates as minors in custody of the state, the school’s legacy continues.

***

Most of the arc of disaster movies takes place in the aftermath of the biggest cataclysm. Yet with horror, the movie unfolds with the promise of only more horror ahead, with thin odds of stopping it. And the danger of the world we live in right now—the reason I think so many of us feel such deep dread—is that we have a sense of the horrors being unleashed and how far they might go.

We’ve seen what happens when vulnerable people are rounded up into camps and the rhetoric of hate is used against whole communities for political gain. Society has witnessed what happens when racism is enforced by law, and women are treated as inferior creatures. History books—and even the recent past—reveal the toll when people go without vaccines, and contagious disease runs rampant.

On some level, it’s perfectly normal to feel a deep sense of horror when the deliberate malice and the cyclical nature of our current crises make themselves itself apparent. The call is coming from inside the White House.

If it all feels overwhelming at times, part of the reason is because we aren’t just dealing with recovering from a disaster. We’re far beyond a cleanup on aisle 14. The feeling of dread is a sign that we’re still in the middle of it all. We have yet to break the cycle, and it’s clear now just how hard that will be. But the cardinal rule of horror movies—don’t go into the dark basement alone—holds here. Perhaps the better path is to understand the sweep of history and to join together with like-minded people, which reduces the paralytic power of dread. There are no guarantees, but we already know what evil that’s left to perpetuate itself is capable of.

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