We must stop the camps while public opinion still matters

We are losing our freedom. And we may never have more power to hold on to it.

OK, we haven’t lost our freedom so much that we cannot, like dissidents of Putin’s Russia, write freely about how we’re losing our freedom or stand in the streets and yell and point about it. You’re reading this. You can share it with your friends and family without risking a knock at your door. You can go to a Tesla Takedown or yell at your member of Congress. And you should. Yet every honest person knows the Trump regime intends to cage as many of us as it can until we’re all caged in our fear. 

The risks we face so far mostly involve losing one's job, contracts, funding, TV show, vaccines, or the vast majority of what the government does to keep average Americans safe, healthy, and able to function.

But we’re well past questioning if we’re dealing with fascism. The fascism is going hard, escalating relentlessly. Its only limits come when it crashes into the reality that the lies they used to sell fascism, especially about immigrants, are the opposite of the truth. 

Now, we’re in deep. Anyone who is ignoring the threats to equal justice under the law is doing so out of ignorance, denial, or a fascist desire to toy with people who care about freedom. And the biggest thing we’re in denial about is the camps and what they mean. 

We’ve failed the “Don’t give the wannabe dictator a secret police” test, and the president is doing openings of concentration camps like Ray Kroc blessing new golden arches.

The mission of all patriots now, while we can, is to do anything we can to make people aware of what is happening in our names so a) everyone knows and b) no one can claim they didn’t know. 

So let’s be precise:

As Andrea Pitzer, who wrote a global history of concentration camps, explains weekly, the Trump regime is busily and messily trying to assemble what can only be called a concentration camp system. That machine of coercion has already seeded an archipelago of torture and hate that has stretched beyond our borders into some of the most lawless states on the planet.

Like all concentration camp systems since the Spanish used the first camps to contain an independence movement in Cuba at the end of the 19th century, it’s inspired by the worst things humans have done to each other. And it’s built on our failures to look out for the least among us. Now, it’s funded with a disgraceful flood of funding for a federal Gestapo, unlike anything America has ever suffered.

Worst of all, the regime and its goons have been unleashed by Republicans on the Supreme Court. Via the corruption of the shadow docket, Trump and Stephen Miller can now doom our neighbors to a horrific fate of spending whole days on their knees in a hellish gulag without even a pretense of oversight under the law. 

And what’s stopping the regime from sucking citizens, including you, into this machine? Nothing. Nothing but each other.

Nothing but the remnants of our fraying civil society, such as the ACLU, the lower courts, and luck. And luck is being intentionally sucked out of the system like it’s an incredible breakthrough in renewable energy that this regime wants to reverse, so we pay more for dirtier power that will sicken and kill our families.

Ok, that’s the bad news. The good news is that most Americans want none of this. 

We’ve already gotten a “test case” for the kind of assault on a blue city that the Trump regime wants to carry out wherever it can. And we hate it.

If the regime gets away with expanding and multiplying all the abominations that Americans are already rejecting like a bad BBL, it won’t be because of public opinion. Only the ivermectin-ed freaks of the base—sans Joe Rogan, perhaps—see any utility in spending hundreds of billions to imprison people who would love nothing more than to pay double or triple that in taxes. If this machine consumes us, it will be because the regime has broken democracy. And verily that’s where we are headed, unless we act fast.

How do we do that? How do we get this regime to stop closing hospitals to open concentration camps? We need more people. We need to be the kind of people who bring others into this movement. That’s what One Million Rising is all about. I invite you to catch up on the first session, which focused on the power of non-cooperation. 

Backed by the latest scholarship and insights from those who study civil resistance, it will provide you with the clearest view of the threats to our freedom we face and the tools we have to overcome them. 

And Andrea has concrete ideas about taking on the camp system that she shares every week on Next Comes What.

The longer we wait, the less powerful those tools will become, as the camp machinery takes hold and the regime consolidates its domination of both the government and corporate America.

So here we are. And the one thing we can never say is we haven’t been told.

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