Concentration Camps, Exile, and Unpersons, Plus

Premature capitulation, plus Sunday Edition music

Bringing back our industrial manufacturing base (credit Weldon Berger)

Concentration Camps, Exile, And Unpersons

Hitler’s regime was careful to construct a framework of German law legalizing all their crimes, which was useful while they were in power if not so much afterward. Chucky the Homicidal Dummy’s regime is unlikely to succeed at that despite the willingness of most, if not all, Republicans to go along with whatever he wants. Other than for finance-related legislation the margin in the Senate is too thin, assuming Republicans don’t kill the filibuster, unless multiple Democrats succumb to the siren song of fascism, for genuinely constitution-killing legislation to advance.

Even without the advantages Hitler and the Nazis had, though, U.S. presidents have a lot of latitude within the law. Shipping a few tens of thousands of immigrants accused of crimes off to Guantanamo Bay may be legal. Reallocating funds to pay private prison companies for building more and larger immigrant detention facilities—incipient concentration camps—on U.S. soil may be legal (and boy is the prospect good for their stock prices).

And we’ve seen already in the short time the Chuckies have been in power that our security services are not all that concerned about sweeping up U.S. citizens in their raids looking for undocumented workers. Citizens have faced deportation—which is absolutely illegal—even under less flagrantly indifferent administrations, with nearly a thousand having actually been deported during the years 2011-2017, and thousands more having narrowly escaped it. One doubts that this administration will be anywhere near as observant of the niceties as the Obama-era blackshirts were, which obviously wasn’t so much.

And of course the wild card in the concentration camp and exile arenas, along with abrogating the role of congress, is the Supreme Court having awarded Chucky (and future presidents, if there are some and the court doesn’t recover its collective mind) immunity from criminal acts in the execution of his duties, which he can convey via pardon to everybody who works for him directly and indirectly. He can do want he wants particularly if he goes with the Andrew Jackson gambit of simply ignoring what the courts say, something both Elon Musk and Oval Office bellhop JD Vance are robustly advocating.

Exile is definitely on the table. So are concentration camps.

And so is the making of unpersons, which was a big part of Hitler’s program. The Chuckies, or at least his management, are opposed to the existence of anyone other than straight white men and their useful idiots. Chucky himself is a misogynist of the first order, has shown himself to despise disabled people, and is willing to throw anyone overboard if it helps him politically, as with trans people and others who aren’t the afore-mentioned straight white men. I wrote more about that here:

Premature capitulation

Most of our institutional press (mainstream media, legacy media, whatever) refused to describe Chucky’s 2024 campaign as the racist and misogynist cesspool it was, and they’re still mostly unable to confront the ongoing demonstrations of it. None that I’ve seen have connected the vanishing from government portraiture, literature and databases of trans people, women, people of color, and others whose trials and achievements the administration want suppressed, with the same tactics in other fascist endeavors from modern-day Hungary to Nazi Germany.

Also in my story linked above, I wrote about how some newspapers, notably The New York Times, have within the space of a few days gone from describing Chucky’s proposed ethnic cleansing of Gaza as “illegal” and “unworkable” to something that, without mention of ethnic cleansing and the crime against humanity that it is, may be inevitable in some form.

Lots of people are standing up to the administration to the fullest extent they can. The institutional press are not among them.

Civil society is coming to the rescue of the civil service

Music

Biig Piig, 11:11, “4AM”

Bill Evans, Loose Blues, with Ron Carter, Jim Hall, Zoot Sims, and Philly Joe Jones, “Loose Blues”

Frances of Delirium, Lighthouse, “Ballet Dancers”

Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten, Chaos For The Fly, “Fairlies”

Fontaines D.C., Skinty Fia go deo, “Skinty Fia”

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