Before neo-Nazi Anders Breivik massacred 77 people in Norway in 2011, he emailed a 1,518-page document, a compendium of his own writing and other far-right texts, to over 1,000 people. The deranged screed warned that Muslim immigration to Europe amounted to an “invasion” of people — whose culture was “incompatible with Western society — that would lead to the “cultural and demographic suicide” of the continent.
Earlier this month, the vice president of the United States went on TV to say the same thing. Speaking with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, JD Vance asserted that Germany is suffering an “invasion” of people who are “totally culturally incompatible” with “Western civilization.” This purported “invasion,” Vance said, will lead to a “civilizational suicide” if it’s not stopped.
It barely triggers a 24-hour news cycle anymore when the vice president and his boss, President Donald Trump, use the same language as fascist mass murderers. I’ve witnessed this process of normalization over the last eight years as a reporter covering the far right, seeing neo-Nazi talking points, especially around immigration, enter the mainstream discourse with horrifying, accelerating speed.
It barely triggers a 24-hour news cycle anymore when the vice president and his boss, President Trump, use the same language as fascist mass murderers.
I fear now that many of us here in America still haven’t registered the logical endpoint of such rhetoric, which both dehumanizes subgroups of human beings and presents them as an existential threat. I fear that even as the Trump-Vance administration now embarks on its extralegal campaign of mass deportation — paired with a campaign to rip away the judiciary of its power to keep the White House in check — many Americans are reluctant to come to terms with the idea of sprawling concentration camps, and worse, in America today. But the extreme actions and rhetoric being taken by the administration are not dissimilar from those deployed in the early stages of some of the worst regimes of the 20th century.
“Concentration camp regimes always need a group they can turn into outsiders by making its members seem so dangerous that the government needs to remove those people from society,” Andrea Pitzer, author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,” told me. “You can’t typically do that without years — years! — of rhetoric demonizing them. Even with the Nazis, it took more than five years from Hitler becoming chancellor of Germany until the mass roundup of Jews as a group began with Kristallnacht in November 1938.”
Trump, Vance and the GOP, of course, have spent years demonizing immigrants, the rhetoric reaching a fever pitch during the 2024 election, with Trump saying immigrants were “poisoning the blood of the country” — a phrasing that bore an unnerving resemblance to wording in Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” — and with Vance spreading the vicious lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets.
“Over time, this demonization creates real fear and gets citizens to go along with measures like concentration camps,” Pitzer said, adding that members of the Trump administration — including Trump, Vance and Elon Musk — have brazenly used racist and dehumanizing language. “By using this kind of language, they’re not just nodding to the same source material of eugenics from a hundred years ago; they appear to be cosplaying earlier fascist leaders, with aspirational nostalgia for their power and abuses.”
The last couple of weeks have offered a preview of some of the horrors to come. There was the abduction by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident who was clearly detained because of his pro-Palestinian activism at Columbia University, as his crying, eight months’ pregnant wife looked on, recording it. (The Justice Department alleges Khalil withheld required information about his past employment in Syria and his membership in certain groups when he applied for permanent resident status.)
There was a video of masked ICE agents — essentially secret police — near Boston stopping and arresting Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and PhD student at Tufts University. Ozturk, who is in the U.S. on a valid visa, was targeted for having “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” according to the DHS, an apparent reference to an op-ed she published in a student newspaper arguing that Tufts should divest from companies tied to Israel. She was taken to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana.
The Trump administration is proud of what it’s doing.
There was the deportation of 250 purported Venezuelan gang members to a notorious gulag in El Salvador with no due process, in defiance of a federal court order that the plane deporting them turn around and come back to America, a photographer witnessing the inmates be slapped and kicked and shoved, capturing the moments when their heads were forcibly shaved.
There were the deaths of two immigrants at the Krome North Processing Center in Miami, which has been described as “hell on Earth,” with videos capturing detainees held “like sardines in a jar,” sometimes without access to food, water or toilets.
The Trump administration is proud of what it’s doing, blasting out news releases and social media posts bragging about its latest detention or forced deportation. “Following my previously signed executive orders, I proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a radical foreign Pro Hamas student on the campus of Columbia University,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after Khalil’s arrest. “This is the first arrest of many to come.”
In support of his “stiff-arm saluting” billionaire “first buddy” Musk, the president also suggested that he would send anti-Tesla protesters to the infamous prison in El Salvador, where inmates are made to do forced labor. “I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” Trump wrote, again, on Truth Social. “Perhaps they would serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions.”
This week the U.S. homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, posted a video of herself to X visiting the El Salvadoran prison, standing in front of a cell packed with shirtless brown men with shaved heads, staring silently at the camera from behind bars as Noem, wearing a baseball cap, warned immigrants that they too could end up in this gulag. “I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you can face,” she said.
And last month, the White House posted a deeply disturbing, dehumanizing video on X appearing to show ICE officials placing immigrants in handcuffs before they boarded a plane for their deportation. “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” the caption read, using the initialism for autonomous sensory meridian response — a pleasant physical sensation prompted by typically soft sounds. In this case, the sound was of human beings being put in chains. Pitzer recently went viral on Bluesky for noting that historically “concentration-camp regimes were proud of what they were doing and wanted attention for it.”
In Myanmar in 2015, the regime allowed journalists to visit the camps where Rohingya Muslims were being detained. In Augusto Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s, photographers were allowed into the National Stadium, where people were being detained and tortured. “Even the Nazis allowed New York Times and Times of London reporters into their early concentration camps in 1933,” Pitzer told me. “They wanted their targets to be terrified, but they were proud of what they were doing.”
The last couple of weeks have offered a preview of some of the horrors to come.
For now, the administration is focused on pro-Palestinian activists and immigrants they insist are “gang members,” often with thin evidence and no due process. But as the famous Martin Niemöller poem suggests (“First they came for the communists / and I did not speak out / for I was not a communist …”), fascistic regimes eventually come for the rest of us, too.
“The arc of concentration camps is twofold,” Pitzer explained. “First, there’s supposedly some very bad group so dangerous that the government says they have to be removed from society. Second, the definition of who’s dangerous expands, often coming to include political opponents and rivals.
“If the government can arrest civilians with no criminal record and put them on planes out of the country without accounting for who they are or for any actual legal process — as has been happening in recent weeks — what would stop them from deporting whomever they like?” Pitzer continued. “Or from saying they had deported detainees while actually disappearing people to black sites internally? If the courts can’t enforce due process and find out who’s being detained, where they are now and what’s happening to them, then we’re all vulnerable.”
When Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi who went on an anti-immigrant killing spree in 2011, posted his murderous manifesto, it included a quotation, often attributed to Napoleon, that imagined an all-powerful leader, free to do whatever he pleased. Last month Trump posted the same quote on X.
“He who saves his Country violates no Law,” it said.
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