When my middle school history teacher described Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, he said that in the beginning hardly anyone took him seriously. “It would be like some random wacko in Orlando using hate speech to incite crowds,” he said. I was reminded again of that parallel when Donald Trump launched his 2020 presidential campaign in Orlando, Florida.
What the Trump administration is doing is not new. Declaring perspectives and experiences outside of dominant society to be “improper ideology” is standard practice.
Psychiatric wards are designed to narrow people down to this standard, which is erroneously referred to as “recovery,” when people are only considered “recovered” once conformed to the mechanisms of the corporatocracy.
Exposing the exploitation that the corporatocracy perpetuates, the documentary 13th written and directed by Ava DuVernay illustrates how institutional slavery continues to exist today due to the design of the Thirteenth Amendment. Its structure has allowed for authorities to declare minor actions - such as filling out a document in a non-approved way - as crimes, thereby justifying the enslavement of those labeled criminals.
The loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment is for the gain of the enslavers. The unacknowledged current reality is that prisons are concentration camps. When the US government pushes for more prisons and executions, not only in the US, but globally - that is a Nazi tactic.
Adolf Hitler studied the brutality of American slavery and Jim Crow laws as inspiration for his rule of Germany. The reason that the government wants us to dismiss this background is so they can get away with replicating it in various forms for profit, deeming those who support these tactics to be “true patriots” and those who don’t to be “enemies.”
To those of us who refused the COVID-19 vaccine, do you remember how quickly we were declared undocumented? I had a range of privileges through the pandemic, while oppression was compounded for historically marginalized groups.
The Trump administration is doing everything they can to declare their narrative as the ultimate truth while persecuting dissenters. The forceful push of Operation Warp Speed is on repeat. From coerced pharmaceutical products to constructing torture chambers, these fascist tactics must not continue to be business-as-usual.
June 3, 2025