During the public comment period of a Schuylkill County commissioners’ meeting several days ago, I got scolded for using the words “concentration camp” for the ICE “megafacility” that the Department of Homeland “Security” wants to inflict on Tremont Township.
As soon as I read the first sentence of my statement, Commissioners’ Chair Larry Padora accused me – loudly – of “doing a disservice to the Jewish community” by “comparing this to the Holocaust.”
Actually, I wasn’t. The ICE monstrosities aren’t death camps, but they do fit Merriam Webster’s definition of a concentration camp: “a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.”
Although this term is commonly associated with the slaughter of Jews and other people the Nazis scapegoated, it originated in the late 1800s during the Spanish-American and Boer wars.
Padora isn’t the first GOP official to clutch their pearls when someone describes the Trump/Project 2025 regime with words associated with unspeakably evil governments. White House Deputy Chief of Staff/immigrant abduction czar Stephen Miller and Schuylkill County’s own Congressman/regime cheerleader Dan Meuser, for example, have ranted about the use of the f-word (as in fascist) and the n-word (as in Nazi) in connection with the White House.
But this regime hasn’t stopped pushing our country to become something that may not turn out to be an exact replica of Nazi Germany but bears a scary resemblance to it. (Earlier this year, Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton said “tyranny” is probably the word we’re looking for, but there are more than hints of theocracy and oligarchy, too.)
Whatever Donald Trump and his Project 2025ers are trying to do, it’s sure to hurt most Americans and probably most of the world.
Read the tea leaves
Just as my county commissioners couldn’t imagine foisting a 7,500-bed concentration camp on a township whose infrastructure barely serves its 300 or so residents, I don’t want to believe even now that our representative democracy is on its way to some brutal form of authoritarianism.
But not all reigns of terror start out that way, which is why we can’t afford to forget what this one’s major players have already signaled:
* While running for Senate in 2021, JD Vance said that if he were advising Trump, he’d suggest seizing “the administrative state” by replacing federal workers with his kind of people. Anticipating court rulings against this power play, he added: “Stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
* At a 2023 campaign rally, Trump echoed rhetoric of fascist dictators like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler when he said he’d “root” out opponents, whom he described as “vermin.” Trump spokesman Stephen Cheung, who now has that job in the White House, called people who made that comparison “snowflakes” whose “sad, miserable existence will be crushed” after Trump is reelected.
* Later in the campaign, Trump told attendees at Turning Point Action’s “Believers Summit” that if he wins, “we’ll have it fixed so good” that they wouldn’t have to vote again. And he continues to tease an unconstitutional third term for himself.
* Trump and Vance campaigned on vile lies about immigrants.
* After the election, the White House screened applicants for government positions by gauging their loyalty — to Trump.
* After a lone gunman assassinated right-wing political operative Charlie Kirk, Stephen Miller falsely claimed the regime’s opposition incited him and issued this threat: “You will live in exile because the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”
*Trump/Project 2025’s Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr has repeatedly threatened to revoke broadcast licenses of networks whose programs displease the regime.
* Trump/Project 2025’s “Justice” Department has mounted frivolous cases against just about anyone who’s tried to hold Donald Trump accountable.
A “cudgel” against dissent
But back to the concentration camp expansion. One of the most frightening comments I’ve heard in this very frightening time came from Miles Taylor, who was DHS’s chief of staff during the first Trump administration.
“My former department does not need that much detention space to go arrest violent criminal folks who are in this country undocumented,” he told MS Now host Rachel Maddow recently. “… The math only adds up if you’re trying to build a police state.“
Specifically, he said, “DHS is being used as Donald Trump’s cudgel against dissenters and the political opposition in this country.”
Some might call this far-fetched, but I doubt most Americans would have believed before the election that Trump would be starting or threatening to start pointless wars and openly rigging the midterm elections to ensure Congress would keep kowtowing to him.
So before this regime eliminates every right and freedom we have, we must keep calling out its toxic agenda. And sometimes that takes words that the powers that be don’t want to hear.
Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.
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