Trump calls for concentration camps for Americans

Steve Schmidt is the only person with the right headline today

That the regime is planning to deport citizens to concentration camps is all that matters now. This changes everything about our options.

It used to be that you had to make people stateless in order to disappear them; Hannah Arendt wrote about this extensively as the “fatal flaw” in the human rights framework, which depended on the will and power of states to protect their citizens under the rule of law.

Last year one of our respite workers shared with me Severance by Ling Ma, which she’d read for class. In it, a plague strikes - a plague that causes people to, in a zombified or robotic or, apparently, human way, continue to go through their daily routines and work unstoppably, stupidly, beyond the point where it made any kind of sense. But. The main character, who theoretically is not infected, does the same thing, for months, even though no one else any longer goes to her high-rise corporate office tower in New York, even after she can no longer commute and has to live in the tower, even after she realizes she is pregnant and isn’t interested in the father any longer.

That’s us. We keep going to work and “managing” whatever gets thrown at us: tariffs, visa revocations, funding cuts, censorship, threats to cut the Social Security our residents use to pay their rent and threats to cut the Medicaid that pays for families to have an occasional break from caring for their disabled loved ones, or for those loved ones to live in group housing or have a job coach.

So: what is to be done?

The “Hands Off” frame from the last protests is so wrong and failed I fear it was invented by Russian/Republican infiltrators. It implies that everything was fine on January 19, 2025, so the goal is to go back to that status quo ante. (1) It severely limits the top end of what we might gain to what we had then: which was 14M hungry children in the US, 8 year wait lists for families to get help in Iowa with their loved ones with intellectual disabilities, closed wait lists for Section 8 housing, women being prosecuted for having miscarriages, black people 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than whites, black people 5x more likely to be imprisoned than white people, and the top three richest American men having more wealth than 165 million American families.

What we need is the opposite: a hands-on return to actual democracy and representative government, where the rich weren’t stealing just about everything from us: money, time, food from our kids’ mouths, libraries, schools, clean water, winter, and places to live that aren’t infernos of fire.

Maybe the frame is: Just Stop It. Meaning the regime needs to stop it. And we stop too: we stop going to work. We stop going to Costco. We stop going to kids’ sports events. Just Stop. A General Strike. We bring food outside from our homes. Doctors provide care in the streets.(2) And we all sit down and talk about what we really want. Maybe more direct democracy - states have obviously failed, and corporate neo feudalism looks to be worse. Maybe health care for everyone. Maybe we say that women are people. Maybe we say that all kids should have enough to eat and something to hope for in the future. There’s enough for everything for everyone, if we stop letting the rich men steal it all.

But we can’t do any of that if they’re going to send us to concentration camps. Or maybe now it’s more clear to everyone that we’re going to have to figure out how to change the world in spite of the fact that a bunch of us are going to the camps.

(1) The left keeps losing b/c our leaders refuse to use cognitive science to frame our messages. The Democrats fired George Lakoff in 2006, which would explain everything if we were engaging in monocausotaxophilia (one of my favorite words, which I learned from Kim Stanely Robinson). Our failure to do so is killing people. Gil Duran, who partners with Lakoff, has a substack and podcast called Nerd Reich about the Network State and the way the tech bro oligarchs want to incarcerate and enslave us all in corporate-run towns. It’s worth a look.

(2) Do not talk to me about doctors and licensure and why they can’t provide care in the streets. Let’s just sign up all doctors in the US to Doctors without Borders. Because I am so sick of doctors who’ve been violating their Hippocratic Oath since 1917, when they started lobbying against health care for all.