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The second Trump Administration's Nazi agenda

I was reluctant to call the first Trump Administration a bunch of Nazis. I'm not reluctant to call the second Trump Administration a bunch of Nazis.

This is largely due to their extremist agenda of mass deportation, their intense demonization of nonwhite immigrants (legal & illegal, and both those guilty of non-immigration crimes & those innocent of non-immigration crimes), their proud apathy toward evidence as to whether someone is actually an immigrant (at all, or of a certain kind), their hostility to any and all due process, their positive glee for sending immigrants to torture prisons and de-facto death camps and sites that are likely to turn into de-facto death camps, and their enthusiasm for giving maximum power to the secret police (ICE) who will likely carry out the bulk of the enforcement of the crusade (possibly alongside an illegally “domestic police”-ified military).

(By “de-facto death camp,” I mean a site of imprisonment that will predictably kill many prisoners via neglect and/or torture, even if killing many prisoners is not the primary point of the camp. The Nazis ran both outright death camps and de-facto death camps.)

Much of this was theoretically the agenda for the first Trump term as well, which was already monstrous (though in many of the same ways as the “mainstream” GOP agenda up until then)–but back then there was far less organization by the Trumpers, and there were far more checks and balances. The Trumpers have become hugely more organized and have railroaded through many of the checks and balances, such as by obtaining favorable court verdicts and credibly declaring an intention to ignore unfavorable court verdicts. They are set to railroad through many more obstacles, and their agenda now has gained immense funding that may be nearly impossible to roll back.

There might not be a mass extermination in progress, and I'm not at all sure that they will actually lock up or deport millions of people. But they have marked millions of people for deportation, and they are trying to lock up deport millions of people (a process which will involve mass imprisonment), and they’ve dedicated a huge budget to it. So it's hard to dismiss this as mere political theater to pander to bigots (which it has sometimes previously been, and which I'd much rather it still be). So the threat of imprisoning millions of people is very much on the table.

It gets much worse. They have essentially redefined "deportation" as sometimes including imprisonment without trial in a foreign torture prison-- camps which frequently kill their inmates through intentionally cruel neglect and torture, even if there aren't gas chambers. This is in fact how the Nazis killed many of their victims-- through intentionally cruel neglect and torture in concentration camps that were not designed as death camps per se.

The problem goes far beyond the mere idea of deportation. None of my most serious condemnations rely on a defense of open borders (though I think it’s plausible that we should have open borders). I’m not sure that I object to deporting undocumented immigrants who have committed serious violent crimes. It seems plausible to me that imprisoning people who’ve committed serious violent crimes is sometimes justified (though it also seems plausible to me that prison abolitionism is correct). If it’s sometimes okay to imprison people for such crimes, then plausibly it is also sometimes okay to deport people (to a country in which they have citizenship and extensive prior experience) for such crimes (without imprisoning them in said country afterwards, if they were not tried for crimes in that country). I don’t have a strong position on this. But none of this can justify the (A) extreme fearmongering about undocumented immigrants who commit serious violent crimes (who are simply not numerous enough to justify extreme fearmongering), nor especially (B) the nationalist-right’s frequent conflation of [undocumented immigrants who commit serious violent crimes] and [undocumented immigrants in general]. The case for deporting undocumented immigrants for immigration status alone is vastly weaker.

But it gets even worse. It is one thing to consider mere illegal immigration (whether the travel itself or the over-staying) to be an act or status for which any given person is (morally) eligible for deportation. I do not hold this view, since I think it causes unconscionable harm to many undocumented immigrants and their loved ones to impose such a threat over their day-to-day lives. But I understand that many people do hold this view, and it arguably follows from widely held principles of immigration law and rule of law. But it is quite another thing to commit massive efforts to mass deportation in order to actually seek out a large or maximal number of undocumented immigrants. The latter is obviously much more costly on every level, and requires authoritarian measures to carry it out effectively. For instance, Trump correctly stated that we cannot do a trial for every undocumented immigrant. This means a mass deportation requires overriding due process on many levels–which will surely increase how many legal immigrants and non-immigrant citizens will be deported (as well as numerous procedural and substantive violations of the rights of morally “deportable” undocumented immigrants insofar as there are any).

But I also want to emphasize how much more extreme and blatantly evil this is than "merely" a mass deportation of nonviolent undocumented immigrants. ICE has become a secret police who arrest people without even showing their own ID or proof of government enforcer status. They operate as masked thugs, they put people in unmarked vans, and move them across state and national borders–often to places where they are held without trial, in substandard or inhumane conditions, and sometimes for long spans of time without the ability to notify loved ones. ICE has been empowered to disappear people. And the Trump Administration intends to massively, massively scale up these activities with hugely more resources.

They're making more substandard prisons for immigrants in the US, which will also clearly be intentionally neglectful and cruel–it is an open question whether they will rise to the level of Salvadoran prisons, which we will see in time. And of course, they've been sending some immigrants (including at least some legal immigrants, and possibly some non-immigrants) to torture prisons in El Salvador, with indications that they’ll do this a lot more if they can.

Trump has floated the idea of cooperatively building more torture prisons in El Salvador, where he wants to send massive numbers of immigrants and indeed non-immigrant American citizens (what I assume he must mean by “homegrowns”). Which non-immigrant American citizens? To my knowledge, he hasn't specified, but apparently a lot of them.

Taking the logic of all of the second Trump Administration's actions and deeds at face value, it seems they are willing to do an unlimited amount of evil to a potentially unlimited and growing set of people–starting primarily with undocumented and nonwhite immigrants, and ending who-knows-where. The racist pattern is obvious from their actions so far, and they’ve allied with many people who are openly declaring that they want the agenda to be racist–so it’s safe to assume the pattern will continue to be racist. And this includes sending a potentially indefinitely expanding set of people to a deportation process which has no internal obstacles or objections to foreign torture prisons, where we know many people will die of intentionally cruel neglect and torture, which again is one of the main ways the Nazis killed their victims.

The strongest criticism of the Nazi comparison is probably the argument that the Trump Administration is less like the German Third Reich, and more like especially evil and authoritarian times in American history, such as McCarthyism, violent anti-union crackdowns, and FDR's mass imprisonment of Japanese (among other) immigrants. The Nazi comparison seems increasingly strong to me, but I still recognize the case for evaluating each country's evil actions through the lens of its own evil history and how evaluating it through another country's evil history (say, Germany) could distort the analysis.

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Did Charlie Kirk self-report, or is the tweet fake? Some investigational notes...

I have been seeing a lot of cases lately of leftwingers sharing fake tweets falsely attributed to rightwingers. This seems to have increased a lot in recent weeks. I don't blame people who unknowingly share these, but creating them is bad, and people need to be more skeptical of tweet-screenshots. This one attributed to Charlie Kirk might be the latest example. I cannot find confirmation that this is a real tweet. If it's real, Kirk deleted it.

Twitter user abierkhatib claims to have checked and confirmed that it's real. So either it is real, or this person is lying or mistaken (not satire). But I don't know how to assess this user's credibility. I cannot find anyone else attesting to having seen the tweet, and that's suspicious. The tweet supposedly has a ton of comments, retweets, and likes, as seen in the image. So it is even more suspicious that I can't find any further evidence of its existence. All copies appear to be versions of the exact same screenshot (with the supposed 27k likes, etc.).

Rightwingers, including Kirk, HAVE engaged in unhinged and racist attacks on Mamdani for eating rice with his hands-- but this does not mean the Kirk tweet is real.

I looked on two web archives (the Internet Archive, and Archive dot ph), and I could not find any backups of Kirk's twitter feed from more recently than late June 2025. Beyond what I've already tried, I don't know how to confirm if an image of a deleted tweet is real or fake.

All this epistemic labor on the anus tweet, I have done for you, dear reader.

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The US government is planning to hire thousands of new ICE agents. To anyone who is considering joining ICE: First and foremost, I encourage you to repent of your wickedness and to promote love and justice instead. Second, if you insist on joining ICE (and if you don't try to sabotage it from within), then I encourage you to consider compromising yourself to a permanent end.

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Good post by Irfan Khawaja on why we should all say "Death to the IDF"

Death to ICE. Death to the IDF.

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Death to ICE. Death to the IDF.

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I hate the new Trump era, for many reasons. One of those reasons is what it’s doing to my moral character. I’ve made several posts about how I think some people are evil, and how I think it’s okay to hurt them. I think these posts are probably true and justified, but I also think the way I’ve made them, and the motivations I’ve made them from, stem from bad moral character on my part–and I think it’s obvious that my moral character has become worse over the past several months.

I think the new Trump era has caused me to acquire worse moral character than I previously had. I hate myself, and I hate Trump and many of his supporters for causing me to become a more hateable person than I previously was.

I think a lot now about wishing awful things to happen to people. It makes my life and myself, as a person, much worse than before. And I still maintain it’s the fault of the people I want to see hurt, not mine. I wish their life was worse, instead of mine. Their moral character is already vastly worse and probably always will be, even if mine continues to get worse (which it probably will).

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David Cage’s “Indigo Prophecy” contains a scene where the main character tries to save a professor from a car running him over, and then the professor dies anyway–and it sure looks like the main character killed the professor, by pushing him to the ground. David Cage’s “Heavy Rain” contains a scene where the main character tries to save his son from a car running him over, and then the child dies anyway–and it sure looks like the main character killed his son, by pushing him to the ground. Absolutely incredible that Cage screwed up both of these scenes in the exact same horrible way, making the main character look like a killer by accident via bad visual direction.

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Twin Peaks’ post-Laura story in Season 2 is sometimes criticized for poorly imitating David Lynch’s style. Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes is sometimes criticized for poorly imitating Hideo Kojima’s style. Overall I agree with these criticisms. But oddly enough, the dumbest moment of Twin Peaks Season 2–the moment when someone becomes a nightstand drawer knob–was actually David Lynch’s idea. And the dumbest moment of MGS: The Twin Snakes–the moment when Snake points his gun at Baker–was insisted upon by Hideo Kojima.

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someone should make a fan-edit with like 2/3 of the VIP dialog cut out

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I just saw Zohran Mamdani's "halalflation" video, now, when I am high on cough medicine. How these videos keep finding me when I am high, I don't know. The videos, they come to me.

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Today at the Dollar General, there was nobody at the cash register. There was a squeaky toy with a paper taped on it saying "please squeeze for assistance." lololol

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Initial googling indicates nobody has written anything analyzing Heartman ("Death Stranding") from a disability perspective. Remarkable omission in the Death Stranding analysis literature.

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To find free books: "Anna's Archive"

To convert EPUB books to PDF: "Zamzar"

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I always thought SovCits and pseudolaw raised interesting questions for philosophy of law. Glad to see some scholars are taking up these questions and seriously exploring them. The first scholarly anthology on SovCits and pseudolaw is out now.

(Not necessarily affordable, though!)

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I have been corrected on the origins and ontology of the LOTR Palantir (not demonic, sry), and also the timeframe of the company Palantir (it was made in 2003)

Can't believe two of the most influential and evil organizations in the world today are called "DOGE" (named after the dog meme) and "Palantir" (named after the demonic crystal ball used by the bad guys in LOTR). If you wrote a dystopia novel saying this 15 years ago, it would be called unrealistic.