Training Up a Bunch of Brownshirts
This was never about immigration or law enforcement — it was always about destroying democracy. It was always about war
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Yesterday, JD Vance’s tweeted:
“I want every ICE officer to know that their president, vice president, and the entire administration stands behind them.
To the radicals assaulting them, doxxing them, and threatening them: congratulations, we’re going to work even harder to enforce the law.”
In response, I quote-tweeted him:
“This has nothing to do with immigration enforcement. This is about training up a bunch of brown shirts to destroy democracy, initially targeting brown people because Trump was confident they would go undefended. Now they have demonstrated they can and will target anyone, and cover up for cold-blooded murder.”
For those unfamiliar with the term ‘brownshirts,’ it refers to the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing, which used violence, street fights, and threats to help Hitler’s rise to power. If you haven’t read my Who Went Nazi series, I recommend it for the deep dives into the playbook parallels we see today.
It also explains the archetype of JD Vance:
But today, I am thinking about my Hot Type column for Byline Supplement from last year, where I asked a simple question: How Many Is Enough?
I asked each and every one of you to search your soul and ask yourself, how many people illegally deported to a concentration camp are you willing to tolerate?
In that column I wrote:
There’s a profound truth in the conclusion to the 1961 film Judgement At Nuremberg, when a Nazi judge, played convincingly by Burt Lancaster, begs the US judge who headed his tribunal to believe him when he said, “Those people… those millions of people… I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it!”
To which the US judge, in an iconic performance by Spencer Tracy, responds, “It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”
In multiple reports by members of the American legal profession, who appear to be stricken with the belief that the rule of law still exists, they distinguish between people who are in America legally and those who are undocumented. They cite judges and Supreme Court rulings, and they appear to be suffering from a massive failure to read the already changed strategic landscape.
Donald Trump is a criminal — a convicted felon, who is the celebrity addition to a cell of dictators.
He is signaling the end of the rule of law, while also previewing coming attractions for “home-growns”.
In his recent meeting with Nayib Bukele in the White House, Trump told the Salvadoran president that “home-growns are next” and that El Salvador would need to build “about five more places” to hold American citizens. This comment got laughter from the audience gathered to watch these bullies flaunt their cruelty.
But in conversations I’m having with people who understand the rule of law, they still appear to be clinging to the belief that there’s some magical line between the lawful and the lawless and that only ‘criminals’ will face punishment.
And that’s when I lose my mind.
Dehumanization
How many is enough?
Is it okay in America to rip people from their homes, children from the streets, without due process, regardless of their status? Is it okay to send them into a black hole, only to offer photo ops for Trump cronies to look hard, as undernourished shirtless men are dehumanized in the background?
The cruelty is the point, it’s always been the point.
But does that mean Americans, too, must become cruel?
How many people denied due process in America is enough to spark a revolt? One? A dozen? A thousand? Fifty thousand?
Or will Americans become like Germans in the 1930s, just going about their day as their neighbors disappear and smoke stacks spew out ashes of human remains…
Images of men in the prison camp known as Cecot look positively medieval, but again, that cruelty is the point. Dehumanization is the point. The photos are designed to strip the men of agency. They are no longer sons or fathers or husbands. We must see them as hardened criminals getting what they deserve, so the strongman leader is exalted for cleaning up crime.
We know of at least one man who was wrongly expelled. Is one enough? Or do we need more to be convinced?
As Viktor Lazlo, the resistance leader in the film Casablanca, said: “If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die.”
Do we understand that our enemies aren’t the poor, but the billionaires who are exploiting the poor for their own fascist ends?
‘America Is Now In Fascism’s Legal Phase’
More than three years ago, in a report for the Guardian, Jason Stanley wrote an article entitled “America Is Now In Fascism’s Legal Phase”:
“There comes a tipping point, where rhetoric becomes policy. Donald Trump and the party that is now in thrall to him have long been exploiting fascist propaganda. They are now inscribing it into fascist policy… We are now in fascism’s legal phase.
“Defending a fictional glorious and virtuous national past, and presenting its enemies as deviously maligning the nation to its children, is a classic fascist strategy to stoke fury and resentment.”
Yale professor Jason Stanley, the author of How Fascism Works, now lives and teaches in Canada.
Read the room. Jason has.
Americans, the world is looking at us right now, and wondering what we are going to do about the lawless, murderous, regime, that is now coming for our allies and neighbors.
How many is enough?
Yesterday, when a brownshirt murdered a mother, a poet, the regime moved in lockstep to deny us reality.
I was the first reporter in 2016 to use the word gaslight in relation to Trump. I had seen the Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman film, and in November 2016, I finally found the word I was grasping for — the lies came fast and furious and as Jason Stanley taught me later, conspiracies and lies always precede fascist capture. People must be trained to not believe their eyes and ears.
But understand, ICE has murdered before. A man in Los Angeles, running from a raid was killed in August when he was hit by a car. A man in Chicago was shot and killed by ICE in September. We know of at least six people killed by ICE, but what about the 32 people who died in ICE custody in 2025? What about them?
Is that enough?
This is not about immigration — it’s war, on us.
The only place Trump and his brownshirts should be invited to is The Hague.
Truly, our last defense.
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