American Gulag

On social media last Monday, Vice President, J.D.Vance, who once said that Trump “could be America’s Hitler,” had this to say about the so-called Big Beautiful Bill: “Everything else – the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy – is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”

As much as it hurts me to agree with this sorry excuse for a human being a second time (the first was the Hitler line), I do. In spades.

In the news, to which I’m attached as to a poison IV drip, what’s screaming for every American’s attention is that the Senate version of the Republican bill provides $8 billion for an additional 10,000 members of ICE, $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement, $858 million for signing and retention bonuses, and another $45 billion to expand ICE’s detention capacity. Oh, and another $6.2 billion for modern surveillance - principally biometric and screening technologies, including AI threat detection technology.

We don’t need AI to detect the threat. It’s here. It’s domestic. It’s in the paragraph you just read.

Everything else is immaterial.

Forget for a moment the other horrors this bill will usher in: the cuts to education and various anti-poverty programs, the 12-17 million Americans it will deprive of health care, all the rest. Just focus on this, because it’s all-important. ICE is already an anonymous, quasi-military force that operates outside the law, that routinely snatches people off of American streets without a warrant, then holds them without charges for as long as it likes without giving them access to legal counsel. That force is being expanded enormously. It’s being expanded despite the fact that the Chairman of Homeland Security himself, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, said that the expenditure and the expansion were unwarranted. It didn’t matter.

It’s not subtle. An internal army is being formed as I write. The thugs are lining up for their bonuses. Who’s going to oppose them?

Let’s take a look at the $45 billion to expand ICE’s “detention capacity.”

You don’t need to be a retired professor of language and rhetoric to smell a euphemism this rank. It’s worthy of Goebbels and Himmler.

“Detention capacity” = camps.

What kind of camps? Policed by whom? Under what legal authority? For who, exactly? And why do we need so many when the thrust of the administration’s policy has been toward deportation? All good questions.

A camp is just a camp. The devil’s in the adjective, which can be descriptive, or not. Call a high tech “facility” a “transit camp,” or a “relocation camp,” and most people will slumber on. Call it a “concentration camp,” and watch what happens.

There’s nothing – absolutely nothing - about a high tech camp that dictates what it will be used for, what it can be turned into. Especially when there’s no oversight authority, which we can be absolutely sure there won’t be because ICE is already brazenly refusing to allow congressmen and congresswomen into their facilities.

Raised above the rule of law by our compromised Supreme Court, Trump is building a nation-wide system of prisons, funding a private army.

You still think this is about illegal immigrants and criminals? He’s said himself that “homegrowns are next.” He’s said that we “have a lot of bad people that have been here a long time.”

These camps will be whatever he wants them to be.

They’ll house whoever he wants them to house.

The sign over the gate means nothing.

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Orwell explained it brilliantly in his essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Language matters. It signals intention. Particularly when it’s obscure.

Euphemisms are linguistic masks meant to hide something ugly, and it should tell us everything we need to know about this regime that it uses them constantly as part of its arsenal of lies.

It’s not the first to do so. The Nazi leadership, to take the incendiary yet apt example, used them constantly, as a matter of policy. Mass murder was Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), or Befriedungsaktion (pacification). The mentally ill and handicapped weren’t gassed, they were desinfigiert (disinfected).

The Soviets called the secret research and development facilities staffed by prisoners in the gulags, "special design bureaus."

You have to wonder what the German High Command would have called the “Big, Beautiful Bill.”

They’re building a domestic, paramilitary force.

They’re funding $45 billion-worth of ‘camps.’

Everything else is immaterial.