Atrocities under an American flag
A few weeks back, my son and I were hanging out at a restaurant/bar in the Florida Keys that was filled with laid back people and a ton of dogs.
Tucker and Mabel enjoy beach bars, and quickly made friends with the dog laying under the high top table next to ours. That led to small talk between us and her owner, a gregarious man who told us that she was a rescue, and about his life-long devotion to saving dogs who were out of chances.
He was getting his check as we were making our order, and as he stood up to leave, he put his ball cap on his sunburned head.
It was an Alligator Alcatraz hat.
How can I explain the indifference towards human suffering by a man fetishizing cruelty who couldn’t bear to see a dog suffer?
I can’t.
Look at this map:
Look at this list:
Cities Identified by ICE
These 23 locales were named in plans for warehouse-based jails.
What do you see?
For me, I see thousands of cars filled with moms and dads, brothers and sisters, friends and commuters driving by places of misery and suffering.
I see them barreling by at 70 mph, barely conscious of what might be happening behind the fence, behind the gates, in anonymous looking e-commerce warehouses that have been repurposed to become part of an interconnected “gulag archipelago,” where human beings are degraded, abused and exploited.
But I also see a future when the warehouse concentration camps are closed and emptied of suffering human beings and their sadistic guards.
When that time comes Americans will still drive by the warehouses. They will have become museums and memorials where everyone who passes by will know what happened there.
Americans will drive by day by day, and the warehouses will blend into the scenery. They will be visible and invisible at the same time. They will be remembered and forgotten at the same time. People will drive by day by day looking straight ahead, not over at what had been — and can never be forgotten.
Let me share a story about driving by such a place during a morning commute.
Lublin is a small Polish city a few hours from Warsaw with a beautiful old town — and a death camp that sits on its outskirts.
Lublin was busy that Wednesday morning, springing to life after a long holiday weekend.
Traffic was consistent heading out of town at 8 am, nothing diabolical, but heavy.
The roads were filled with cars, commercial vehicles, trucks and delivery lorries, over a series of turns and hills that led away from the city.
Off to the right there was an opening, a green space of sorts. At first glance, it presented like a thousand municipal golf courses might somewhere in the United States or Canada, but this wasn’t that.
Majdanek, a Nazi concentration and extermination camp, was captured by the Red Army in 1944 during a lightning surge forward. The SS kommandant was completely incompetent, and failed to destroy the camp’s infrastructure and records. It was captured intact, exactly as it was. The gas chambers and ovens stood as they were:
The showers were captured intact.
The empty Zyklon B canisters littered the floors, and were stacked like artillery shells:
The entirety of the infrastructure where the Nazi selection process played out was captured as it was, and as it functioned.
The prisoners’ barracks were captured.
The stolen shoes of the murdered were discovered in enormous bins, awaiting shipment back to the Reich:
At the top of a slight rise stood the main crematorium:
The chimney once shot flame and smoke from it. When it did, the occasion was primarily the immolation of murdered Jews.
The enormity of the crime and the details of the planning process involved in its execution are simply mind-boggling. Even when Germany was losing the war and retreating, the cover-up of the murders remained a priority of the highest magnitude.
What had begun with political rhetoric in Munich beer halls and rallies in Nuremberg ended here:
They ended in a horror that overwhelms the mind. This is where unbridled hate and unrestrained power lead.
This is fascism.
My friends, there can be no looking away from this.
These are the horrors that are celebrated by MAGA degenerates like Nick Fuentes and the Tate brothers.
Megyn Kelly, perhaps the most thoroughly broken woman in America — demented, twisted and evil — celebrates Nick Fuentes.
Tucker Carlson, a raging antisemite, is clever enough to avoid denying the Holocaust himself, while utterly content to advance Holocaust denialism by celebrating the deniers. This makes him complicit in a type of secondary murder.
Together, these people are a disease, a cancer of the American soul and spirit.
The people who committed these crimes were not monsters.
They were thoroughly ordinary.
Jakobus Onnen was a school teacher, who became an SS murderer. This famous photo is called The Last Jew in Vinnitsa:
Onnen was not identified until October of 2025 through the use of AI technology.
The fascist murderers of Alex Pretti have been identified as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez. They both wear the uniform of ICE, the American SS.
They, too, will face justice in this world or the next.
When evil manifests itself through a political party or the power of a state, that power can be made to feel universal and ubiquitous.
It never is.
In the end, it is relatively small numbers of people who carry out, plan, conceive and perform the horrors.
There is a disease that runs through all of history that compels some to seek power and kill with it.
Those like Stephen Miller and Laura Loomer are attracted to a sphere where there is room for simpletons who see the world in disordered colorings.
Politics has always attracted the weak, sad, lonely, desperate and needy, like Lindsey Graham.
When those qualities become unmoored from any higher principle and cause, there is always danger.
There has never been a shortage of politicians who, when they feel the adulation from the crowd and the power of possibility, go off the rails.
What began as promises of national greatness in Germany ended in cataclysm for all of humanity.
It occurred across a thousand killing fields and a vast network of death camps that were the last exit in a system of slavery and madness.
It resulted in the killing of 11 million human beings.
The achievements of the Third Reich represent the apogee of humanity’s capacity to commit evil at an industrial scale.
It killed millions, based on a dogma of madness that destroyed a thousand years of civilization — and nearly exterminated the whole of a people who had existed, thrived, been persecuted and endured for a thousand years of European history.
More than 405,000 Americans were killed, and multitudes more maimed psychologically and physically, in an all-consuming national effort that saved the world, remade it, and made the United States of America the most powerful nation in world history.
The war was fought to defeat an evil called fascism.
What was it?
What did it believe?
How did it come to power?
These are the most important questions across the millennia of recorded human history because the answer is key to our collective survival.
They are urgent questions with simple answers that have become complicated because of the disorientations that result from the blinding impact of ignorance and forgetfulness on human memory.
The death camps were the fulfillment of a promise made and kept.
The Nazis promised retribution and revenge. They delivered.
What is most important to grasp about the Nazis and the industrial scale of the murder is that it happened, and the people who did it said they would.
The height of the killing at Madjanek came during Operation “Harvest Festival,” which played out on November 3-4, 1943.
During those days, more than 40,000 Jews were executed in trenches that they had dug themselves.
This was the bloodiest single action of the entire Holocaust.
Because the camp was so close to the city of Lublin — and scores of civilians lived around it — the SS tried to obscure 40 hours of continuous gunfire with loud music.
The gunfire was heard.
The zig zag trenches can be seen. So can the mass graves.
This is where fascism led.
The lesson is as relevant today as it was the moment this place of evil was discovered.
At a minimum, between 95,000 and 130,000 prisoners died in the Madjanek system between November 1941 and January 1945.
We all know how the Nazi story ends.
Who could have imagined that ending in 1933 or 1937, 1938 or 1939?
We are at the beginning of an American horror.
Nobody should presume to know how it will end.
MAGA is building warehouse camps.
Evil will manifest in those concentration camps. Atrocities will follow that will be wholly different than Nazi atrocities.
The main difference will be that the atrocities to come will take place under an American flag. That is unacceptable.
It must be stopped.
This is the warning.
What I don't understand is how Democrats can be debating over how much money they should provide to ICE in order to enable them to continue its predations. Our cities are being used as practice arenas for how to control forcefully large populations. The socalled "Big Beautiful Bill" provides enormous funding for ICE. ICE is a weapon against the American people. It serves as Trump's SS, a tool for establishing a dictatorship as now becomes crystal clear. It is also crystal clear that it must be defunded, disbanded, its members dismissed or brought to justice. What could be clearer? What Democrat of sound mind would vote for its funding under any circumstances? They would be funding their own demise. Compromise with an alligator is not possible. Compromise is singing on the way to the gas chamber.
The Alligator Alcatraz hats, shirts, and mugs, which are apparently big sellers in Florida, are one of the reasons for my hatred of red states. Keep electing the Ron DeSantis’s of this country. We already know you for what you are.