Hello World: Help Us Stop This
Dachau, 1933; Everglades, 2025
Dear rest of the world: This is the 21st century equivalent of the groundbreaking of Dachau, 1933; the Reich is just getting started. America is going to need some help to make sure this doesn’t end up like the last time.
Donald Trump just visited “Alligator Alcatraz,” which was billed as the state of the art in immigration enforcement by Trump and his sycophants, but is clearly just fenced-in cages, inside a tent, in a swamp, in Florida, in hurricane season—a horrifically exposed, deadly concentration camp. Nevertheless, Kristi Noem declared it to be a model for “every other state” to follow.
The Trump regime is showcasing this blatant attempt to mimic the Holocaust because it riles up their base, which should tell you how radicalized they are. It means they want death camps. The point isn’t the cruelty anymore, it’s the killing. Hannah Arendt said it best.
I write as a once-proud American who has spent five years warning about this moment. And so it has come. The United States is very close, maybe a few months, from losing its democracy, if it hasn’t technically already. The federal government is incompetent and out of control, but stumbling quickly into a full dictatorship anyway—via a fascist personality cult led by a man who has largely lost command of his faculties.
Here is the President of the United States being asked a question about “detainees,” twice. He has no idea what the word means so he assumes the question is about himself.
REPORTER: Is there a specific time frame you expect the detainees to spend here days, weeks, months? And does that have anything to do with the immigration judges you just spoke about being trained and staffed here?
TRUMP: When you say what was the first part of your question?
REPORTER: Is there a specific timeframe you expect the detainees to spend here, days, weeks, months?
TRUMP: In Florida?
REPORTER: Yes, here in Alligator Alcatraz.
TRUMP: Look this is my home state I love it. I love your government. These are all friends of mine. They know very well. I'm not surprised that they do so well. They're great people. Ron has been a friend of mine for a long time. I feel very comfortable in the state. I'll spend a lot of time here. I want to, for four years, I've got to be in Washington and I'm okay with it because I love the White House. I even fix up the little Oval Office. I make it, it's like a diamond. It's beautiful, it's so beautiful. It wasn't maintained properly, I will tell you that. But even when it wasn't, it was still the Oval Office, so it meant a lot. But I'll spend as much time as I can here. My vacation is generally here because it's convenient. I live in Palm Beach, it's my home. And I have a very nice little place, nice little cottage to stay at, right? But we have a lot of fun and I'm a big contributor to Florida. You don't pay a lot of tax and a lot of people move from New York. And I don't know what New York is going to do. A lot of people moved to Florida from New York and it was for a lot of reasons. But one of them was taxes. The taxes are so high in New York they're leaving. I don't know what New York is going to do about that because some of the biggest wealthiest people and some of the people that paid the most taxes of any people anywhere in the world for that matter, they're moving to Florida and other places. So we're going to have to help some of these states out I think. But thank you very much. I'll be here as much as I can. Very nice question.”
Despite the fact that he is manifestly unwell and incapable of coherently commanding the U.S. Armed Forces or any of his other duties, the personality cult around Trump has just gotten more servile and inhumane. Just today Trump threatened to prosecute CNN for accurately reporting on the Iran conflict; he said he would start deporting American citizens, including Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani; and he said he intends to bypass the Constitution in order to steal enough House seats from Democrats to win control next year—right out in the open. Ron Desantis, is happy to go along with it, despite the fact that it’s all wildly illegal.
The Rule of Law in America has fallen.
The Senate just passed a budget which is suicidal to themselves and the country but demanded by the leader, and so it was done. It will kick off 16 million from health care, including many of Trump’s own supporters, but it will also balloon the budget for ICE, the Trump regime’s version of the Gestapo, to ensure there are versions of “Alligator Alcatraz” operating all over the nation. JD Vance said this was the most important provision.
The supplemental ICE budget is two-and-a-half times the total budget of USAID, which was finally just folded after months of brutal attack by Elon Musk and DOGE. Those cuts to USAID will, according to a study just published, cost 14 million lives, including 4.5 million children under 5.
The cruelty isn’t the point, it’s the death. This is a racist, genocidal regime deliberately causing the deaths of more Black people than died in the Holocaust, while building a massive paramilitary of anonymous thugs to round up all the brown people in America to put them in concentration camps.
The Supreme Court just declared that the president can violate any law, including ignoring birthright citizenship, so Trump’s secret ICE police can round up citizens to boost deportation numbers, without fear of pesky oversight. Moreover, the theocratic cult masquerading as the highest court in America unilaterally eliminated one of the only ways the judicial system could check this violent, insane president—the injunction. Then the “Justices” went on vacation for four months.
To further complicate our national breakdown, Trump has thrown his lot in with Netanyahu who will be coming to the White House next week to gloat about the Palestinian genocide he has wrought—and the totally ineffective joint attack on Iran, which set Iran back a few months on their nuclear program, and sent them right into the arms of Putin and Xi.
Trump and Netanyahu will also, sickeningly, discuss their plans for “Trump Gaza” and the systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine. More cruelty and death, suffering and genocide, portrayed as some kind of transnational mafia buddy film.
But Trump’s working with Israel against Iran also means that he’s under a great deal of pressure from Putin, and from a large segment of MAGA, who don’t want war and don’t like Netanyahu.
So, Trump is feeling like both an unstoppable dictator, and extremely vulnerable from his own supporters. What do dictators like him in this position historically do?
Scapegoat their own citizens. Create rage and violence in their supporters against a targeted group.
Go to war. Build nationalist furor and cover up domestic crimes and failures.
Usually, both.
The killing in the Nazi concentration camps didn’t start at a large scale until the war started, and I am deeply concerned not only for the welfare of countless people in America, but for any number of countries that may end up being targeted. Trump has already attacked, non-kinetically so far, our own neighbors, like Greenland, Canada, Mexico and Panama, has conducted a massive air strike on Iran, and promised to help ethnically cleanse Gaza.
There is no telling what he’ll do, anywhere. You need to consider the United States Weimar in 1933. As I have extensively documented, it is not history rhyming, it is plagiarism. If you were in your position, whatever it is now, in 1933, knowing ahead of time what would happen just a few years later, what would you have done?
Think about it. But not for long.
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You are right on the money. I'll say it in plain English. This insane motherfucker needs to be stopped at all costs. America is almost out of time. Stop fucking around. Get organized and shut the damn country down in protest. Help your communities manage the tough times ahead. Shut down the money flow to those that consider you disposable.
"The cruelty isn’t the point, it’s the death. This is a racist, genocidal regime . . ." I've been waiting to see the word genocide used in describing what's been coming at us since Project 2025 and the second trump regime. Thanks for having the honesty to do so, Jim.